#my gas/water/trash bill came out today

[phoenixiancrystallist]

Day 310, finished the shading on Pleased and got Tired inked, colored, and shaded! *\o/*

[softandweto]

Help

I know I should put this up somewhere else, but I can’t. Tumblr is my only option and I need all the help I can get right now please.

I had to make a GoFundMe because there’s nothing else I can do. Please spread the word and the link is right here. I’ll be putting the same info in the GoFundMe under the Read More for those who want information up front.

Hello, I hope this finds any who visit well. Before I get into the reason for me making this, I’d like for you all to know how we got here.

My name is Xenia and my boyfriend and I have been living together for nearly a year now. At the beginning, things were going very well. We both had a stable income, and while that trailer was not the best place, we were secure and didn’t have to worry much about finances. Then, March came around and Covid hit us hard. I lost my job as a Teaching Assistant for Special Education, and my boyfriend’s job got more dangerous as a Med Tech working in a nursing home. I was unable to find a job for months, and things were starting to take a bad turn. 

We had some friends living in the state next over who had offered the both of us to move in with them. My boyfriend would have to go back to CNA work, however, as that would be the only license of his that could transfer to the state. My license as a Teaching Assistant was originally for that state, so it seemed to be perfect. After weighing all our options, we decided to make the move and take the risk.

Once again, things were looking well. We both got a new job within the month, and only had to worry about paying a combined $600/month outside of our car payments. With all this, we were able to put up with a lot of things. A majority of the house leaving the place in disarray for the both of us to handle. The racism that we didn’t catch up on until the end. The disregard for my dogs and their health. The fact that, despite how behind the house supposedly was on bills, they could afford to continue to finance new furniture and electronics while we could barely afford to pay the rent and our own food. We could put up with it because we were with friends. No way they would do all this on purpose.

Eventually, after two months of living there, it became too much and they used every excuse possible to force us out of their home and ostracized us. Suddenly, we were the issue. It was our fault their dishes continued to pile up. It was our fault they felt too anxious to leave their rooms. All their problems were now because of us. We had no other choice to move in with my mom and my brother in our old state. Once again, we were out of jobs and couldn’t find work no matter where we looked. I eventually found a job as a server again, but he was unable to find any work despite his CNA credentials.

When October came around, I was working full time for a server minimum wage, while my boyfriend had finally gotten some good news and was starting to work. We scrimped and saved for two months and were finally able to get enough to get our own home. A trailer in a small suburb just outside town was freeing up early December. At first, the price for the rent seemed impossible to make. But, I had received an email from a work from home position I applied for. Early January, I would be starting with them for more than minimum wage.

Things were finally coming into place. Things were once again looking up and we could taste the stability. Then, after a week of being moved in, we decided to enjoy a meal together made in our own home. All the stress, all the craziness we had put up with, it was worth it. But, we couldn’t taste our food. We started noticing the coughs when we were moving, but didn’t think much of it till then. We got tested, and our fears proved to be true. We had Covid.

It was brutal. It felt like suddenly we’d lose everything. The two weeks we spent in quarantine was like our own personal hell scape. Within the first week I was notified they were training someone else to take over my Shift Lead position. A title more than anything, since the pay did not change and minimum wage was all I could get, but that didn’t stop what I knew was coming next. A few days later, I was let go. Tossed aside like an inconvenience. For my boyfriend, they just put him out entirely. For the third time in one year, we were both out of a job. But now, we could face eviction.

We recovered from Covid, and just in time too. I was able to start my new job, but two weeks of no pay had put us out tremendously. One company hired my boyfriend, but we would shortly learn that they would never actually give him any hours. December and January have tested us on what we could and couldn’t live without. We had to forgo a majority of necessities.

We couldn’t set up a disposal service. We had to leave mail to pile up. Living off Dollar Tree groceries. Go weeks without gas. Pawn what we could just so we could make rent and utilities. Now, with February ending, all of this has caught up to us. 

Months of garbage have piled up so high we’ve designated a “trash room” just to keep it out of the way. Toiletries have been out for weeks, but we can’t even afford groceries so soap and cleaning products are out of the question. Our propane is almost completely gone. All the cans of food we had stockpiled are a day away from running out. And we can’t afford our bills. Not with all my checks being used to barely keep us alive.

My boyfriend has recently started a new job, but they won’t pay him in time for us to pay our bills. Which is why I’m reaching out to y’all for help. We have both done everything in our power to keep ourselves above water, but now we can no longer keep it up on our own.

Here is a breakdown of our situation as of today:

My recent paycheck is completely gone after using it to get some of our bills stabilized, but they are already getting back into the red with how far behind we are.

Our car payments are coming up as well as insurances. One car payment is my full check, and we won’t be able to pay for one of them, much less their insurance

We were able to get rid of four bags of trash thanks to some helpful neighbors, but it’s starting to pile once more and I’m worried bugs will start to come out

Internet and Electric must be paid within the next few days in full or risk disconnection. With these two gone, I can’t make any money whatsoever

Food will be out as of Tuesday and with no money left from my check, we’ll be unable to get any groceries for who knows how long

We just ran out of Propane which is used to keep water hot as well as to cook

I hate asking for help and not letting people know what the situation is or what the money will be used for, so I will do so now.

I am asking for 2500 which will leave us with a touch of extra money for things like groceries, toiletries, and vehicle maintenance that is greatly needed. The breakdown is as follows:

$550 - Rent

Rent is due on the 12th of each month and requires two checks to meet. Last month we were able to pay in two separate payments, but our landlord has said that it was the only time and March forward it will need to be in full each month.

$650 - Car Payments

Both cars are $300/month, but we’ve passed my boyfriend’s due date and have incurred a late fee. My car is due on the 6th and if it’s not paid in time, they will repo.

$500 - Insurance

Both Insurances are ~$250 each. Without the insurance, the cars will also risk repossession and my boyfriend needs the vehicles for transportation

 $235 - Internet + Electric

I’ve lumped these together since they are both necessary for my job as well as being ones that need to be paid by this Tuesday or they will disconnect

$100 - Propane

$100 gives us enough propane to last a month. Without this, we can’t shower, do laundry, or even cook

$120 - Disposal + Mail

Disposal and Mail service needs to be set up as soon as possible, but to be honest they are low on my priority list compared to everything above.

$345 - Groceries, Toiletries, Cat Care, and Car Maintenance

With the extra money we can comfortably get through a month with little hassle. I know that more bills will be due later on, but once my boyfriend starts getting steady checks again We can at least make it through on our own with this little extra

I know that right now, things are very tough. I may also come about as rather...presumptuous and hopeful that maybe, just maybe, people can help us out in our time of need. I know it’s a lot to ask, but if you see this and are unable to help us out yourselves, please spread the word as much as you can. I cannot allow us to fall after everything we’ve been able to get through this horrible year. Please, if you can give even a dollar, that’s one dollar closer to getting out of this hole.

Thank you, and I hope that you all have a safe and happy time going forward.

[buckyscrystalqueen]

Find Your Light: Part 1

Pairings: Jason Momoa x Reader

Warnings: Cheating (not Jason or reader), swearing, angst

Word Count: 1,754

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Are ya ready for this, sweetheart?” You glanced at your mother, Sarabeth in the full length mirror as she fixed your veil in your bottle blonde hair to fall behind your shoulders. With a small sigh, you nodded at her as you pulled up the beaded v-neck of your Pnina Tornai ball gown for the hundredth time.

“You have everything in my car?” You asked as you looked at yourself in the mirror.

“Bags, extra burner cell phone, cash, plane ticket, hotel information… ’s’all there.” She reached up and gently grabbed your arm to turn you around to face her. As tears welled in her eyes, she nodded at you with a smile. “I am… so damn proud of you. An’ I know your daddy would be too.” With tears in your own eyes, you nodded at her and gave her a weak smile.

“Honestly, I’m proud of myself.” You both looked over as your maid of honor, Ashley knocked on the door.

“Read… Oh, (Y/N)! You look gorgeous!” You forced yourself to bite your tongue and smile at her and you knew your mother was, too.

“Doesn’t she? My little, sparklin’ angel.” You smiled at your mom as she offered you her arm with a smile. With one final nod, you grabbed your bouquet of purple calla lilies with your vows wrapped around the stems and headed out the door. You held your head up high and walked as confidently as you could behind your best friend.

“Just remember to get it on video.” You whispered to your mom as you came to a stop outside the chapel doors. You looked over at her as she pulled the top of her cell phone out of her purple, slightly too revealing dress.

“Oh, I’m all over this.” You smiled at her as the doors finally opened to reveal the bride to the nearly 500 guests that were invited. You smiled with a warmth that didn’t quite reach your eyes and forced one foot in front of the other to get to the alter.

‘Minutes… just a few more minutes.’ You thought as nervous butterflies flittered about in your stomach, threatening to make you sick. ‘You can do this, (Y/N).’ When you finally found David’s eyes through the crowd, you swallowed hard against the bile that rose in your throat. Tears welled in your eyes as your mother passed your hand to your fiancé. As you passed your bouquet to Ashley, your mother gave you one last, knowing look before finding her seat as literally, your only family member and the only person you invited.

“We are gathered here today…” You looked up at the officiant, some friend of a friend of David’s who was glad to make the non-denominational ceremony go as quickly as humanly possible. Your fiancé nervously played with your fingers as his eyes danced across the profile your face before looking up at him as well. Long seconds turned into even longer minutes before the officiant finally got to the vows which you had purposely requested to come before the ‘I do’s’. You looked over at your soon to be husband with tears in his eyes as he pulled a single note card from his jacket pocket.

“My dearest (Y/N). I vow to love you, every waking moment of my life. I vow to be there for every moment you need me to for the rest of eternity. You have brought me more joy than you could ever know and I can’t wait to see where my lives take us and what the future brings us.” You smiled at him and couldn’t help but notice how bland, lifeless and impersonal his vows were. It was almost poetic. With a smile, you turned and grabbed your vows from the bouquet… not that you needed them.

“My darling David. I stand before you today with heavy heart.” You glanced up at him with a smile as you let your hands fall slightly to your side. Vengeance coursed through your veins as you cocked your head to the side. “Did you honestly think I would marry you when you were fucking my best friend?” You watched his smile drop as your guests gasped and your mother burst out laughing.

“What? You didn’t think I knew? Well, fuck me, baby. It was kinda obvious to anyone with half a brain. Seeing as though I hate the color purple. It’s Ashley’s favorite color… and it was forced on me by you. This dress? Wasn’t the one I wanted what so ever. Ashley wanted it. Which is probably why you went behind my back and ordered it over the one I wanted. Oh, and the nanny cams that I had in our room for the past few weeks were the icing on the cake.” You glanced out into the crowd and found Mike, Ashley’s husband’s stunned face in the front row.

“Sorry, honey. She was fucking him in your bed, too.” You looked back at David’s livid face and smiled. “You are garbage and I hope you spend the rest of your life miserable and alone. But then again…” You turned around and eyed your supposed best friend with a look that you wished could kill. “You can have this trash all to yourself now.” With a roll of your eyes, you looked back at David one final time.

“Go fuck yourself.” You grabbed the front of your wedding dress and turned away from the alter with your middle finger in the air. Your mother cheered loudly and some of your (finally) ex-fiancé’s friends and work colleges joined in. As quickly as you could, with David screaming after you, you ran out to your waiting car to hopefully make it to the airport in time for your solo honeymoon.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The sun warmed, Hawaiian sand felt good on your bare feet… as did the feel of the bottle of champagne in your lap. You had your God awful wedding dress fanned out around you and you didn’t give a damn that people were actually blatantly staring at you. The only thing you were concerned about was paying the surf instructor David insisted on hiring before you took your dress straight into the ocean to purposely trash it. You figured the tulle would hold up alright, but the beads and Swarovski crystals on the bodice were gunna be no match for the waves and salt water of the Pacific ocean.

“Well I take it you’re (Y/N).” A deep, male voice as a shadow fell across your lap as you took a swig of your champagne straight out of the bottle. You nodded as you set it back down and looked up at the man behind the voice. Your jaw literally dropped as you leaned back the slightest bit to look at him and his extreme height.

“Fuck me.” You muttered to yourself as your eyes dragged down his tattooed, muscular forearms, bare chest, and wash board abs. You had never in your life seen someone that was the pure definition of a long haired, bearded, caramel Adonis and you thanked God you were single. “I am (Y/N) but honey, I’ll be whoever the fuck you want me to be.” The moment the words left your mouth, your eyes went wide and your face flushed cherry red. The man crouched down next to you as you bent over and buried your face in the skirt of your dress.

“So I’m pretty sure I already know the answer but um… it’s just you?” You sighed, sat up and grabbed the pack of cigarettes off the sand beside you.

“Just me. My ex-fiancé is probably balls deep in my maid of honor right about now.”

“Ouch.” He muttered as you chased the drag of your cigarette with a swig of champagne. “One more question…” You looked over at him as he gestured to your gown. “What’s with the dress?” You pointed to the ocean with your champagne bottle.

“Trashing it. Wasn’t even the one I wanted. I was just waiting to pay you first. Oh! That’s right.” You set your bottle down on your lap and bit your cigarette between your lips as you pulled up the end of your dress. You grabbed the small handbag you had strapped to your leg with hair ties and sat up. You pulled out ten, one hundred dollar bills and handed them over to him with a smile. “There is a good chance, since I bought out three gas stations of Guinness and I have two more of these in my hotel room, that I will hopefully be too intoxicated to stand up on a surf board.”

“You’re a Guinness girl?” You smirked and nodded as you took a drag of your cigarette.

“Best beer there is to an Irish girl.” Your brow furrowed as you looked over at him. “Wait, what’s your name?”

“Jason. It’s Jason… or J. Either one works.” You nodded as you put your cigarette between your lips and offered him your hand.

“Well Jason, thank you so much for offering to teach me how to surf. I hope you enjoy your next two days off but now, I got a date with an ocean and another bottle of champagne on ice in the stupid honeymoon suite.” You rolled your eyes as you grabbed the bottle of champagne from your lap with a shrug. “Free rooms a free room, though… fucker.” You took a long swig as Jason grand the cigarette from your fingers.

“Oh, no. You’re not getting rid of me that easy.” You looked over at him and shouted ‘hey’ as he took the bottle of champagne from your hands and stood up. “You wanna trash that dress? We’re gunna do that shit right. Come on. I got an idea.” You frowned as he moved in front of you between you and the water and offered you his hand. With a heavy sigh, you took his hand and let him pull you too your feet. You instinctively put your hand out on his chest to steady yourself in the sand and noticed that he had nearly a foot of height on you.

“God damn, man…” You muttered as you looked up at his gorgeous green eyes. He smiled at you and nodded.

“You’re not to bad yourself, nani.” You cocked your eyebrow at him as he gestured to the parking lot behind you. “Come on. Let’s go have some fun.”

Part 2

[bxxpbxxprichie]

Lost (Reddie) (1/8)

Summary : Richie Tozier is struggling with something. Something he’d never thought he’d have to struggle with. Sure, his parents can be pretty shitty, but he never thought it would come to this. It’s now been about a month since Richie has been kicked out of his house. He has made do with sleeping in his truck, and passing out on nights that all the losers are together, but things are becoming more dire. With what was left of his money stash gone, Richie is forced to make a living by prostitution. There’s also something going on with Eddie. Eddie Kaspbrak, mommy’s boy and pill expert has been put on a new pill. This time, it was of his own doing, and not his mothers. What it’s for, no one knows.

Pairings : Eventual Reddie with hints of Stenbrough and mentions of Bikeverly (Ben/Mike/Bev)

Warnings : Slight noncon, prostitution, homelessness, bad language, and over all Richie’s trash mouth.

AN : Ayyyeee! This is the first time I’m posting a fanfic on Tumblr, but it’s also the first IT anything I’m posting. Keep in mind that all of the characters are 18/19 at this time, and in their senior year of high school. There will be eventual smut, but how in depth I haven’t decided. The characters in no way have any relation to the child actors that have portrayed them. IT does not belong to me, however if it had I would’ve changed a lot of things in the book.

Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Chapter 1

Word Count : 2010

“That’s good… So good…”

Richie kept his eyes closed, his mouth being assaulted roughly. His throat hurt, tears welled in the corner of his eyes.

“What a good boy you are.”

He couldn’t believe he was in this situation. Just past eighteen and on his knees in a seedy gas station bathroom for money.

“You’re too good at this-”

The strangled moan from the man flushed down Richie’s own throat, hot liquid being forced into his wet cavern, making him sputter around the pulsing body part.

It’s not like Richie opposed to having dicks down his throat. It was rather that this wasn’t the dick he wanted down his throat.

Of course, he knew the man. Derry was a small town. Mr. Pickles used to be the gym teacher at the elementary school, that thought alone made him queasy.

The older male handed over the money, before shuffling out of the bathroom and leaving Richie to his thoughts as he stuffed the twenty into his pocket and stood from the floor.

He felt dirty. But it wasn’t like it was the first time he’d done this.

Richie crossed to the sink, and turned on the faucet, saliva building up in his mouth as he refused to swallow what wasn’t forced down his throat. He spit a few times, before leaning his head in and capturing mouthfuls of water, trying to flush the taste from his system.

After righting himself enough, Richie headed into the gas station to pay for a few dollars in gas, and headed to school.

There were barely any cars in the parking lot once he got there, something that was good. Richie climbed into the back of his truck, and lifted the seats. Concealed beneath the seats were two plastic tubs. One filled with clothes, and the other sparingly filled with food items, a blanket and pillow, and bathroom things.

Richie gathered what he needed to shower and change, shoved it into his backpack, and headed towards the gym. It was easy access into the building, as they still hadn’t fixed the lock on one of the doors. He strode through the basketball court, and into the boy’s locker room. He dropped his bag on a bench, and began ridding himself of clothes and glasses.

He turned on one of the shower heads, and moved back to his bag to pull out his soap. It was cheap, but at least he was clean. He took a deep breath before stepping under the icy spray, teeth chattering almost instantly. His curls matted together, flattening against his head. He grabbed for what he hoped was his shampoo and started lathering his hair, just as the door to the locker room opened.

“In here again, R-rich?”

Richie hated more than anything to lie to his friends, but they didn’t need to know he didn’t have a place to stay. It wasn’t their problem, it was his.

“Yeah, Big Bill. Got into a fight with my dad this morning and left before getting a chance to shower.” It was the excuse he used pretty much every time Bill found him in here, but the other didn’t question him much. It wasn’t like he had the best track record with his parents.

“S-Sorry about that. What happened t-this time?” Bill had gotten better about his stutter over the years. It definitely wasn’t as bad as it had been when they were kids, but it got pretty iffy when the other got frustrated.

Richie delayed answering by stepping back under the spray and rinsing the soap from his hair. His hands ran over his face, feeling the scruff that had been working itself up since he’d been kicked out for good. He just didn’t have money to buy razors. Sometimes Eddie or Stan forced him to clean it up, shoving their own supplies his way. He had to pretend he wanted this scratchy thing on his face, otherwise it’d look suspicious.

He stepped back out of the spray, his eyes meeting Bill’s where the boy had situated himself on the bench next to his bag. “It was stupid. Something about money and cereal, I don’t really know. Don’t worry about it, he’ll go right back to ignoring me once I get home today.” He gave a soft grin.

“If you s-say so.” Bill shrugged.

“I know so. So, Billy Boy, what brings you to school early today?” Richie asked, trying to lighten the mood as he washed his body with his shampoo.

“S-stan wanted to meet early t-to study for the h-history test. I got h-here before him.” Bill told him.

Richie nodded, rinsing himself off under the spray. “Throw me a towel, would you?” He asked Bill as he turned off the water. Bill tossed him a towel from the clean rack before sitting back down. “So, how are you and Stanley doing, hm?” Richie asked, shit-eating grin on his face as he toweled himself off.

“I d-don’t k-know what you’re t-talking ab-bout.” Bill said all too quickly.

“You don’t fool me for a second, Big Bill. Say, just how big are-”

“B-beep beep, Richie.”

Richie huffed, “I swear, you guys are getting so stiff in your old age…at least something is.” He got his last jab in with a cocky grin as he tucked the towel around his waist and moved to his bag. He dug around, before pulling out his toothbrush and toothpaste, and moved to one of the sinks.

He ignored the looks Bill was giving him as he scrubbed his teeth and tongue, finally ridding the last remnants of the salty taste out of his mouth. The only thing he needed now was a cigarette, and he’d be good for the rest of the day.

His stomach rumbled a bit, reminding him he probably needed to eat something… he’d just wait until lunch.

After rinsing out his mouth and shoving his toothbrush and toothpaste back into his bag, he pulled his clean clothes out. Without so much as a glance at Bill, he let his towel drop.

“F-fuck. Seriously, R-rich?” Bill grumbled, shielding his eyes as if the sun was shining right into them.

“I know it’s big, but don’t act like you’ve never seen a dick Billy Boy.” Richie passed a wink at his friend, before tugging clothes on piece by piece. By the end of it he was in his favorite pair of ripped jeans, a comfy black t-shirt, and his usual converse. He shoved everything back into his bag and headed out of the locker room, knowing the other was following behind.

“So when’s Stan getting here?” Richie asked, as he lead the way out of the gym and back to the parking lot.

“H-he should be here s-soon.” Bill spoke, taking slightly longer strides to catch up with Richie. Richie, Mike, and Bill were the tallest of the group. Bill definitely had Richie and Mike by a few inches, but Stan by about a head. Ben was next when it came to height, and at the end were Beverly and Eddie, standing at the same height of 5′4.

“Speak of the Devil,” Richie commented, nodding towards Stan’s car, in which the lanky boy was unfolding himself out of. “Stan the Man! How ya doin’ this morning?” He called to the other.

Stan rolled his eyes, seemingly already tired of Richie’s antics for the day. He didn’t even bother responding as he picked his backpack up and shut his car door. “Hey Bill.”

Richie scoffed, and held a hand to his chest, “I know you guys are like dating now or something, but you don’t have to act like I’m not here, Stanley!”

Stan raised a single eyebrow, “Where’s Eddie?” He asked, not commenting on the others words.

“Y-yeah, shouldn’t you b-be there by now?” Bill looked to Richie.

“That’s where I’m headed. I’ll be back with everyone’s favorite doctor-in-training in promptly five minutes!” Richie hopped away from the other two and back to his truck. He unpacked his backpack, leaving only school supplies, and shut his back seat. He got in the front and started up the engine, hand reaching instinctively for the cigarettes that wouldn’t be there in the center console. He puffed out a breath and pulled out of the parking lot to start his journey to Eddie’s house.

“Why’s your hair wet?”

“Hello to you too, Eds.”

The two boys held each other’s eyes for a moment, before Eddie got into Richie’s truck, tossing his bag onto the floor board.

“No cigarettes this morning?” Eddie asked snidely, as Richie drove away from his house.

“Not yet. I was going to snag one from Bev when we get to school, I’m out.” Richie adjusted his glasses, pushing them further up his nose.

Eddie didn’t comment in it, and instead turned to stare out the window.

“You alright, Eds?” Richie asked in the silence.

“Yeah, it’s just this new pill I’m on. It’s making me tired.” The smaller boy explained, reiterating the fact with laying his head against the window.

Richie raised his eyebrows at that. “What’s it for?”

As if not expecting such a question, Eddie sat up straight and looked at Richie. “It’s uh…not important. J-just something my mom is making me take, you know. Gazebos and all that bullshit.”

Richie pressed his tongue to his cheek. He didn’t believe Eddie for one second, but he wasn’t going to push him. Especially since it was obviously doing something to him.

They were back in the parking lot within minutes and both were out of the truck. They headed to the usual meet up spot, where Stan and Bill were sitting and talking in low voices. It immediately stopped when Richie and Eddie walked up.

“Oh, don’t stop whispering sweet nothing’s to each other on our behalf. We’ll just go over there and do the same.” Richie grinned, tossing an arm over Eddie’s shoulders. He must’ve been really tired, because he didn’t bother shrugging it off.

“W-we were just talking about the b-battle of-”

“The battle of tongues? I knew you guys were into each other!” Richie cheered.

“Beep Beep, Richie.” This came from Eddie, voice tired, as he finally shoved the other’s arm off of his shoulders and flopped down into a sitting position next to the other two losers, uncaring his khaki shorts were on green grass.

“We were actually talking about you. Bill’s worried.” Stan said, shuffling some papers in his lap, before placing them back into the folder they belonged in.

“Bill’s worried? Why?” Richie looked to the other male, “I’m perfectly fine! Although a little upset that Stan isn’t worried too.”

“What’s Bill worried about?” A nice soprano twinkled in Richie’s ears, and he turned to greet his best friend by wrapping an arm around her waist.

“Bill’s worried about me. Can I bum a-” Before Richie could even finish the sentence, a cancer stick was shoved between his lips by small fingers. He grinned around the filter and took it from his lips to press a kiss to Beverly’s cheek.

“My goddess, my love, thank you.” He accepted her lighter as well and was quick to light up the cigarette, arm still hanging around her waist.

“So why is Bill worried about Rich?” Beverly asked, looking towards the three boys on the ground.

“H-he just seems different. H-he’s been fighting with his parents a l-lot more than usual.” Bill started.

“He is right here.” Richie reminded, flicking away bits of ash from the end of his sanctuary.

“You’ve been fighting more?” Bev looked to Richie with this question,  and before the lanky boy could even respond, he was being pushed away from the red haired beauty.

“Hands off the goods.” Mike bellowed, putting his own arm around the girl’s waist.

“Good morning to you too, Mike. And where is number three?” Richie righted himself quickly, and looked around for Ben.

“C’mon, Richie. Lighten up on them.” Eddie spoke. The boy was now leaning heavily against Stan, who at this point was just letting it happen.

“You walk in on Beverly taking two dicks and a-”

“Beep Beep, Richie!” Beverly called, punching the boy in the arm.

Richie winced and rubbed the sore spot, “I wasn’t making a joke! I was telling the truth!”

@edsrich

[heartsongxsecrets-blog]

The Precipice of Change

@gentlemenxpassion

Grace was a soft-hearted gentle girl; still shuddered during thunderstorms, was still just the tiniest bit afraid of the dark. But most importantly she got scared when she was too far away from her brother for too long. Survival meant that splitting up was necessary at times. They made money as a team when they performed on the sidewalks, but sometimes the weather or the crowds weren’t right for it. When they panhandled they did better on their own, finding different street corners and giving it a good two hour try. It could never be longer than that. By the end of two hours she’d start to tremble, start to feel overwhelmed with the fear that something bad had happened to Richard and that she was never going to see him again. When you had one person who was literally your only person, you’re everything person, needing constant assurance that they were safe and near was par the course.

At exactly the two hour mark, the brunette rose from her spot on the sidewalk, folding up her cardboard sign and counting through her earnings before stuffing the change and bills into an envelope, and then the envelope slipped inside a wallet, and the wallet came to rest inside a purse, and the purse got caught up under the fabric of the light jacket she wore over the dingy sun and time faded dress she donned. Richard had taught them both how to be safe, how to make it hard to be stolen from and taken advantage of. Such preparations against the ugliness of the world were not things Grace would have thought of on her own, which is one of the many reasons she depended on him so much. Time was told by a watch on her wrist. It was technically a children’s watch, painted with swirls of rainbow colors and the face was cracked. Richard had knicked one of her and one for himself out of a lost and found box at the aquarium, on a day when it had been cold outside and they’d scrounged enough money for an activity that kept them indoors for as long as possible.

That was how homelessness worked, you neglected one need in favor of another until you had to meet it. Some days their money was only used for food, other days it did them more good to steal their meager meals from the trash bins of local restaurants and spend their money on washing their shoddy wardrobe at a laundromat, buying a bar of soap and washing themselves in the sink of a gas station bathroom. They were always making a million choices a day, and sometimes that choice had to be making an attempt to nourish their souls. Some days they went to the aquarium, or to a cheap live show at a bar. Some days they spent all their money on double cheeseburgers and french fries, sipping at thick milkshakes till they felt delightfully sick with fullness.

Today was going to involve a choice too, a big one, because they were on the precipice of something huge. Tomorrow they would cross their fingers and put everything they were into auditioning for Sing Me A Star, a popular vocal talent show with a million dollar prize and a contract with a huge record label. Grace tried not to think on it as she shouldered her belongings, her whole life in a hiking backpack. Biting at her lower lip, she glanced anxiously at her watch as she sat on the steps of the public library waiting for Richard. When she saw him trudging through her with his own pack and that slight smile that always worked over his face when he spotted her, Grace practically ran to him, needing proximity, needing his arms around her. “I did really good!” she murmured excitedly as she pulled away, her hands finding his and not letting go. “Twenty-three dollars and seventeen cents in two hours. I must have looked just the right mixture of pathetic and attractive today.” Grace’s humor was morbid, it had to be with the way they lived. If they couldn’t laugh through the pain then they’d perish, by soul if not by body. 

“I don’t think we’ll have enough to pay for everything we need tomorrow though, so this is my vote. We have to have cash for the entry fee, that’s ten dollars. We should be . . . as cleanish as possible, if we look too homeless they may not even let us in. So we need a bar of soap and a couple of jugs of water to wash up with in the morning. The rest I think . . . we should spend on food. I want us to go to bed full tonight and eat a big breakfast so we have all the energy we could need.” She paused in her ramblings to blow at a strand of brown hair that drifted into her face. “Do you think that sounds good? I don’t want to sleep on the street tonight either, I want us as well rested as possible. I saw they’re mostly done construction on that new apartment complex over on Wayworth Street. You up for climbing a fire escape and breaking in? They probably don’t have a security system in that area. As for clothes . . . cause we definitely need new clothes tomorrow, I vote we snatch and grab from Goodwill. Sorry, I’m rambling. . . I’m excited, and nervous, and excited, and terrified.”

[nic-and-annie-in-france]

Belated Christmas Thoughts: Copenhagen

New Money

Denmark doesn’t use the euro; it uses the Danish krone (kr). The conversion rate (at the time of writing) is $1 for 6.60 kr. Or 1€ for 7.46 kr. So $10 is about 8.85€ is about 66.04 kr. Needless to say, I had no sense of monetary value while we were in Copenhagen. 25 kr for a glass of water? That’s fine I guess? Annie didn’t think our BnB in Copenhagen accepted credit cards, and we withdrew our accommodation money in cash at the airport. The BnB did accept our card. We decided to use our cash to eat on for the rest of our time in Denmark. So I carried around a bunch of bills with 50s and 100s on them but struggled to assign a value to them other than “this is worth a lot less than I think it is.”

Tours by Foot and by Boat

In Copenhagen we took two walking tours. I was skeptical at first—walking in the cold with a group of strangers isn’t my idea of a good time—but we ended up loving the tours. I think it's a great way to see a city. We had the same guide for both of our tours. He was an Australian who fell in love with Copenhagen (and one of its residents) and immigrated 8 years ago.

One walking tour took us to an area in Copenhagen called Christianshavn and the other took us around historic Copenhagen. We learned a lot about the history of Copenhagen and its culture as it is today. I learned that old Copenhagen burned down twice within 100 years in the 18th century. Our guide showed us how the fires affected the design of some buildings. For example, he pointed out street corners where the corner of the building makes a 90-degree angle, and contrasted them with corner buildings with the 90-degree angle lopped off, such as the ones below. He said that buildings with the sharp angle predate the fires, whereas the ones with lopped-off corners came afterwards, as they were designed to make it easier for fire brigades to round the corners of the narrow streets. As we moved from one point of interest to another, the guide made conversation with a few people in the group. That made the whole thing feel friendlier.

Behold the lopped off corners (emphasis added).

Annie and I also took a boat tour. I didn’t enjoy this as much. The windows on the boat were scuffed and the view was blurred by the spray of the water. Our guide on the boat spoke through a PA system. It was less personal than the walking tours. As we rode from one point to another, the guide’s commentary was more filler than engaging, but it was still nice to be on a boat. And we were able to see, albeit through a scratched piece of glass, parts of Copenhagen we could have missed on foot.

An old and pretty street 

Nyhavn, an iconic canal in Copenhagen

A statue of Bishop Absalon

A street corner in Copenhagen (with Tivoli on the left)

Mealtime Anxieties

In Copenhagen there were 7-Elevens everywhere. The center of town had three of them within a hundred yards of each other. I expected dirty-gas-station vibes, but they were more like clean little corner stores. The 7-Elevens also served pastries which we bought for breakfast (or sometimes dessert). One of these pastries was the jumbosnegl: a giant cinnamon roll. Annie loves cinnamon rolls. Everyone in Copenhagen spoke English, but menu items were still usually written in Danish, so we got through most of our transactions by pointing and nodding. But in one encounter, I asked for “the big cinnamon roll.” The cashier didn’t understand what I wanted. So I panicked and tried to say it in Danish, pronouncing it jumbo sneggle. Annie and I looked the pronunciation up when we were back in our BnB. Snegl means snail, rhymes with smile, and is not even close to what I said. 😅

I never really figured it out, but I think in Copenhagen you need to be aggressive and assertive at a restaurant to get the server to bring the check. Annie and I are both quiet, unobtrusive people, so this was very difficult for us. Sometimes we would linger an extra 45 minutes in a restaurant, trying to get the server’s attention just so we could pay and leave. It was like they actively avoided eye contact with us and dodged our meek attempts to flag them down. Even though it was stressful when we had something scheduled next, we both found it really funny how absurdly difficult it was to give a restaurant our money.

For lunch on New Year’s Day, we ate at a buffet 40 minutes before they closed. Rather than feel rushed at having to eat in a small amount of time, we were relieved that our server wouldn’t be able to avoid us for hours.

A hip café, where we ate our breakfast around lunchtime one day

In the Rosenborg Gardens

Tivoli and Trashcans

Copenhagen has the world’s second-oldest amusement park still in operation: Tivoli Gardens. Walt Disney visited Tivoli when he was dreaming up an amusement park of his own. A general admission ticket allows you to enter the park and walk around, while riding a ride costs extra (like Roller Coaster Tycoon). Annie really wanted to spend New Years Eve walking through Tivoli even though we wouldn’t ride any rides. I wasn’t so sure. I had pictured walking around Kings Island in the cold and not riding anything. It didn’t sound the best time to me, but if Annie wanted to do it, I’d be happy to go along with her. But I was wrong. Tivoli was great!

The park had a ton of Christmas decorations. The entrance opened up to an area full of cabins and fake snow that felt like walking into a winter wonderland. Annie and I explored the park and found a fake waterfall, fun house mirrors, and more traditional amusement park decor. We didn’t ride any rides, but we did stop and watch a few.

We found a large pond filled with ducks and some wooden xylophones in a garden beside it. We played our way along the line of xylophones and stumbled upon a nautical-themed little kids area complete with a pirate ship playground and a giant whale. There were also two big pipes sticking out of the ground like funnels on a ship, their openings about eye level for a child. When I saw them, I thought they were connected underground and you could talk into them like tin cans connected by string. I remembered things like that on playgrounds from when I was little. 

I told Annie to stick her head in one and I talked into the other. Annie said she couldn’t hear me. The opening didn’t sound as cavernous as I expected. It sounded like it was a small contained space, like a receptacle… Realization struck. These might not have been what I thought they were. The sign above them said “Affald.” I didn’t know what than meant, but I had a good guess: Trash.

Annie and I rushed off to hide our shame and looked up the word. It was as we feared: we had put our heads inside trashcans. Although we were mortified at the idea of being seen by a passerby with our heads in garbage cans, we kept strolling through the park, laughing off our misadventure. It was an honest mistake.

Copenhagen was our favorite stop on our Christmas Tour. Sure, I didn’t have a good sense of the money and we put our heads in trashcans. But I loved seeing the colorful buildings of Copenhagen and learning about them on walking tours and, despite our frustrations with getting our checks in a timely manner (and sometimes mispronouncing food words), the food was excellent. And I thought our evening enjoying the lights and wonder of Tivoli was a pretty magical way to end the year.

The Trashcans

Lights in the Chinese area of Tivoli Gardens 

Fun times with funhouse mirrors

Fake snow at Tivoli

[imgettingtired]

So here it goes I am 28 years old and I live with my family for multiple reasons none of which I feel the need to tell you. My family consists of my mother, my older sister, her husband and myl sister's four children. I'm going to drop names because at this point fuck'em. From oldest to yougest we have Bercley, Austen, Corben and lastly Dylan. I have lived with all of them my entire life with the exception of a few years here and there. Now don't get me wrong I love them and writing this kills me but I have to get it out of my mind before I lose it. I don't really have an issue with Corben much but the other three really need a reality check and I also have a huge problem with my sister and her husband. All of them treat me like shit and like I am a child and yet come to me when the need something. I'm starting to realize how much they use me and it hurts. Lets make a list shall we:

1. My sister and her husband moved out living us kids and my elderly mother here in Az because they wanted to live in Vegas while we didn't so now we are paying two of everthing rent, water, electricity and gas.

2. When Dylan needs someone to drop him off he asks me and when I ask if he did what he was asked to do around the house since he does not have a job and doesn't pay rent he lies to me and says he did so I will take him and I'm the one who gets in trouble.

3. When I had to pick him up from work (when he was working) late at night and I had worked during the day and had to work early the next morning.

4. I am never late to pick them up for work and I never have my phone off in case they need to call me. and yet their phones are always off or they don't fucking answer.

5. Not only do I buy food for Dylan's old dog I also make sure he eats with the help of my mom. I also buy food for all of the dogs and cats in the house.

6. When my brother-in-law needed money to buy a new car I gave it to him. When he needed money for over due rent fees I gave it to him. When he needed money to pay the phone bill I gave it to him.

7. Every month when a bill comes up I ask if he needs any money and never ask to be paid back.

8. When Dylan got stuck in Vegas because of Covid for three months, he asked me to send him pictures of his W-2's and I did.

9. When Dylan left his wax warmer still going after he left and it had been over a week he asked me to turn it off and I did.

10. I have bought Dylan food, clothes, makeup and so many other things and never once asked to be paid back.

11. We only have one car so whenever Austen or Dylan decide to go to Vegas I am forced to stay at work( I'm an in home nanny) for days until they come back and they think there is nothing worng with that.

12. Dylan has asked me to help him clean his room and I have but when I ask for him to help clean mine since he helped make the mess he is suddenly to busy.

13. Whenever the house needs to be cleaned Dylan has plans and never helps but he will complain that it is dirty all the time.

14. When Dylan lost his key to his bedroom like any sane adult (he is 21) he busted his door down so now it does not close. But it is the families fault that the animals are able to get into his room.

15. Yesterday he came home screaming and cussing at everyone over his room being dirty since he has been gone for three months our roomatewas living in Dylan's room while we got his room ready. However he blew up over a room that wasn't even trashed that bad. It was ridiculous.

16. And then there was this morning, last night I confirmed with Austen that he would be bringing me to work today. Instead he never showed up and I had to call my employer to come get me. I am very angry with him.

Alright that is it for this mornings post if anything else fucky happens I will come here to vent.

[notsdlifter]

Kill Hollows: Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE:

BHA-AAB

Robert Warrington’s Journal

Token-Oak, Winter of 1991

10,562 days before the Syndemic

________________________________________

When I say my grandma knew the apocalypse was coming, I don’t mean it in a general sense. She didn’t just foreshadow dark times on the horizon. I believe she saw what was happening: the burning cities, the collapse of agriculture, and corpses along the interstate piled like trash at a landfill. She felt it, too: The intense pressure of knowing ate at her heart and eventually killed her. The incredible weight of this bleak future smothered her before she could adequately warn anyone but me.

She died on a Tuesday right after the wheat harvest. Even in death, the family would say, she accommodated my grandfather's schedule. Grandma planned her own passing—thou the doctors said the aneurysm was a fluke—right down to what she wore to the hospital. One day, Gramps came home from the farm and found her on the sunflower linoleum in the kitchen convulsing. Yet she packed a bag, stashed a week’s worth of leftovers in the fridge, and paid the bills a month in advance. Grandma was spooky like that. She had the foresight of a Cajun mystic.

Grandma had these great big eyes, but she rarely opened them more than a squint. She hid them behind reading frames she bought in the plastic turnstile at the local IGA Supermarket. With her head tilted and her reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose, she dug into people with those eyes. She had this way of looking into a person, right inside their thoughts, like she was vetting them for trustworthiness suitable enough to be her confidant. Few met her standards.

Grandma was a collector, like many women from small towns, she had a “power animal.” She bought cookie jars, bric-a-brac, and mawkish paintings of her “power animal” that personified her best. For my grandma, it was owls: spooky ass, head-turning-180-degree-Exorcist-style, big-eyed, predatory, nocturnal, clawed, and sharp-beaked owls. The damned things filled her home, lurking in every nook, following you with their eyes. I saw my grandma in all those owls.

Grandma loved to scare little kids. Scare them in a way that was simultaneously welcoming and bone-chilling. Over a plate of fresh-baked cookies—chocolate chip that were puffy, crunchy on the outside, yet doughy in the middle—she'd offer you her “insights” of the world. The cookies lowered your guard and the way she spoke really sucked you in, always in a gentle coo. “You know, Bob, those black spots on BBQ chips? Those are boogers from people that work at the factory.” Or, ever so subtly, “I once filled a glass dish with Coke and submerged a metal spoon in it and left it overnight. In the morning, the spoon was gone … completely dissolved. Now, Bob, imagine what that stuff does to your stomach overnight? Have you been checking your poop for blood?” And, let's not forget her stories about chocolate, “that stuff is made from the coco plant, you know, that’s where the 'cho' comes from. Well, the plant is used to manufacture illegal narcotics. A little white powder called CHOcaine. There is something in the plant that pulls people in. Changes their brain. Every bit of ‘Cho’ you ingest is a step closer to being a drug addict when you’re older. A step closer to sleeping in gutters, having no teeth, and never wiping your ass with toilet paper. So, enjoy that Butterfinger, Bob, enjoy it real… slow.”

Yeah, I loved my grandma. Even though she was mean and wrong about a lot of things. I remember her stories because she conveyed them with a quiet passion. She was the only woman I ever met that could scare me to death and make me feel loved unconditionally at the same time.

Grandma grew up in the town of Token-Oak and stayed there her whole life. A town named for the prevalence of thousand-year-old oaks. In its heyday, Token-Oak was a Midwestern postcard town, picturesque in a Norman Rockwell kind of way. In the fall, the foliage from the deep-rooted oaks provided a pallet of Autumn colors so brilliant and varied that people would pull over on the interstate to take family photos with the hills in the background. In recent years, however, the oaks suffered a debilitating disease causing their leaves to fall. These hulking relics stand all over the town leafless and dying, their twisting fingers reaching out into space.

Before things went to hell, townsfolk talked about Token-Oak like a distant relative that once had a multimillion-dollar empire. They never mentioned that the relative spent the fortune on whores and coke only to wind up penniless and using the daily paper as a blanket. Token-Oakeans bragged on the oil booms and the new interstate and the influx of traffic as “progress.” They never mentioned the meth labs, violence, and the strange detachment that permeated the town. No one ever discussed the dark underbelly of Token-Oak, no one except my grandma.

Grandma and this will sound crazy, could predict future events. Perhaps not the exact time or outcome, but she could see the future. Frankly, all grandmothers possess this gift in varying degrees of intensity. Most grandmothers can look at a young man and tell you with surprising accuracy if a kid will be a success in life. In a moderately advanced form, some grandmothers can predict the downfall of a kid, but the advanced ones, women like my grandmother, could predict success, downfall, and the immediate steps necessary to correct the downward spiral. Grandma had the trifecta, the holy trinity, of grandmotherly prognostication.

Grandma knew where I was headed a long time before I got there. She warned me, and my life happened precisely like she said it would. You see, I was what many considered a smart kid, but one that was intensely troubled by emotions. Back in the Eighties, parents didn't throw around psychobabble. Today, I probably would have landed somewhere on the spectrum. In 1986, I was just a fucked-up little kid struggling through life.

Life was one hell of a struggle.

My dad overdosed when I was six. My mom, my brother—his name was Jacob—and I walked into our trailer on a Friday night after going to the County Fair. Dad was laying on the dirty carpet next to the couch. He had this white froth around his mouth, and one of his eyes was rolled back in his head. In his left hand, he held a hypodermic needle. Mom dropped me in the doorway and released a milk-curdling scream. Jacob and I just stood there, in the living room, looking at Dad.

The whole trailer park was around our house for hours. The cops took Dad away in a black sack and combed through the house looking for more drugs. They took buckets and bottles and dirty tubing out of our back room. Pretty much anything that could be used to make meth.

There was one thing that the cops missed. A few days later, I found a spoon under the couch. The backside was burnt black. The neck of the spoon was wrapped with electrical tape. The bowl of the spoon had a white film, and a piece of cotton singed to it, but it still shined. I’d lay on my twin mattress at the far end of the trailer and look at my upside-down reflection in the concave of that spoon for hours.

My mom caught me with it weeks later. “Where did you get this?” she said in a voice that was somehow a desperate plea and a rage-filled question. I told her that I found it under the couch, “underneath my dad.” And Mom cried so long I thought she might have died. But she left me with that dirty spoon.

The next day, Mom went to buy milk at the gas station. A semi-truck hit her car over the bridge by the tire plant. The driver that hit her was so high on meth that he never let off the gas. The roaring engine of the Freightliner slammed her Datsun hatchback over the guardrail and into the icy water of the Smoky River fifty feet below.

In a three-week span, I lost both my parents to drugs. That period changed my life, as you might imagine. Jacob and I went to live with our grandparents. It only took the better part of a week to figure out it was an arrangement that was doomed to fail. Grandma was always watching me, always warning that I couldn’t let my past ruin my life. “You drew a rough hand,” she’d say, “but you have to persevere. Use this pain, don’t let it use you.” She was always telling me to “put my suffering to work,” like it was a fucking mule that could till a field. She watched me with those huge eyes, like a predatory bird.

I still remember every detail of the afternoon Grandma warned me about the future. And that was decades ago. I was at her house on a chilly October afternoon around my birthday. I was shooting hoops with Jacob just before dinner. We had just finished watching the movie Hoosiers. Oh man, we loved to watch movies back then. The final scene was so inspiring to Jacob and me that we ran outside to impersonate the movie protagonist, Jimmy Chitwood. Hoosiers meant a lot to Caucasian farm kids in the Midwest. A good jump shot combined with “fundamentals and defense”—and a shitload of freckles—was all it took for your name to be whispered among the wheat stubble for all-time. It was all polished wood and step back jumpers against rowdy-ass opponents. They balled hard in Hoosiers, like the NBA in the early ‘90s, it was football in shorts.

I was ten years old back then. Jacob was twelve.

Jacob and I were adopted by our grandparents late in life. Both were well into their fifties, long past the age when they had the energy to deal with his shit. Jacob’s life was a cycle in three repeating patterns: (1) he received little attention, so he did something vicious; (2) he received a beating for his actions that made him worse, and the grandparents felt guilty; and (3) then they showered him with toys and freedom. Jacob was raised by television, and he returned to this well of knowledge again and again. He saw the world through a prism of movie montages and climactic scenes. In this cycle, Jacob developed an innate fixation for creating fear and causing pain. Even at twelve, he was growing into a “special” kid.

We were playing a game of one-on-one on Grandma's driveway. The rotted plywood hoop was just above the garage door. I was smoking Jacob pretty good. He was older, taller, and had the lanky frame of a b-baller but lacked athletic ability. I stole the ball from him regularly, and that really pissed him off.

“Bha-aaaaaaaab,” Jacob would say in this voice that drew out the vowels like a bone saw. It was a portmanteau word of my nickname and the sound that Jacob said I made when he hit me. There was something about that way Jacob said it, in this sotto voce hiss that was so full of sarcasm and hate: “Bha-aaaaaaab, don’t be a bitch.” Every time I showed weakness: “Bha-aaab.” If I displayed any awkwardness in a social setting: “Bha-aaab.” If I was too affectionate with my family pet: “Bha-aaaab.” If I flinched when he was about to hit me: “Bha-aaab.” That name, said in that voice, came to epitomize everything I hated about myself. It was as if all my adolescent self-reproach came to life when Jacob hissed that name.

Jacob had this weird thing about movies. He’d see it, and he’d do it. Sometimes, when a pivotal scene came on, I’d look over at him, and his face alone was worth the price of admission. His eyes wide, one eyebrow raised in curiosity, and mouth agape in utter fascination. He studied movie characters: their mannerisms, vocabulary, intonation, and style of dress. He lost himself inside that tubed box like no one I’d ever seen before or since. Then he’d head out into the world and imitate. Art became life. Fantasy became a reality. For Jacob, there was never a wall separating make-believe. It was like he existed in this alternate universe that mixed make-believe and real life like fuel and air into a jet engine. He soared into the deep recesses of the back of his mind.

The game, just like in the movie, degenerated into jail ball. It was all hip checks, and awkward curse words dropped by kids who didn't fully understand their meaning. "Nice shot, you damn gigolo" and "you play like you got a tampon in your ass."

Grandma was doing dishes in the kitchen and watching us through translucent curtains. The kitchen window was just up the stairs and overlooked the driveway basketball court. She often sat up there like a silent observer in a booth. I saw her silhouette every time I looked up. One time, I took the ball along the edge of the driveway towards the hoop and Jacob body-checked me into the garage door. The collision made a tremendous noise. Springs, plywood, and metal wheels erupted like a raucous crowd. I hit the pavement cursing up a storm. "What the balls was that, you fucking boot-licking gypsy?!"

I heard Grandma's swollen knuckles and skinny fingers wrapping on the window pane. Thomp, Thomp, THOMP! The curtains flew open, and we both saw her scowling down. She had wild eyes that trembled, though the rest of her stood motionless. I could see the air molecules around her head vibrating with energy. Her lips were pursed so tight they could cut through the metal of a spoon. It was a look developed through decades of parenting rowdy kids. It was her own version of the machine kill switch. Flip it, and everything comes to a complete stop.

At least for a while. The thin curtains slowly closed, and Jacob and I started playing again. A shot here. A few dribbles there. I grabbed the ball from Jacob and held it behind me while leaning forward. Both of Jacob’s palms faced toward me, his eyes on fire with rage. He looked like a mime performing the trapped-in-a-box routine.

Then we heard some sounds from the end of the driveway. It was the unmistakable clanging of empty gas bottles and the rattle of wrenches against the bed of Grandpa’s pickup truck. There was a nasal whine, a seething breath. Whatever it was, it sounded rushed.

I sat the ball down on the pavement and Jacob, and I tiptoed towards the truck.

A man was standing at the tailgate. His head down and his arms furiously rifled through the truck bed. He wore a beanie pulled down to the tips of his eyes. Open scabs dripped blood from his unshaven neck. The skin on his face sagged in loose pouches. His mouth was open, and his lips curled back on his teeth. His black, infected gums puffed outward. There was a filth to him, a layer of grime that indicated he hadn’t washed in a long while, maybe months. He wore the clothes of a younger person, but he looked like a haggard old man.

The man grabbed a canister of gas, removed the lid, and dumped out the contents. Gasoline vapors filled the air. Gramps had a 100-gallon tank bolted to the bed of his truck that he filled with anhydrous ammonia, a fertilizer that he used during the growing season. The man grabbed the spigot of anhydrous and twisted it open. The repugnant stench of anhydrous overpowered the gasoline. Jacob and I were fifteen feet away, but even from that distance, the fumes burned my eyes and ignited a burn in my throat. The man coughed and growled through the caustic stench as saliva drizzled from his black gums.

The man wore fingerless gloves. He spilled some of the anhydrous on his skin and yanked a hand away, shaking. The caustic liquid ate away at his exposed flesh, but he did not let go of the hose and stood there until the gas-can was full of anhydrous. His eyes squinted hard as he held the can under the spigot. I could smell his flesh burning.

Whenever Grandpa handled the anhydrous, he wore thick rubber gloves and a respirator. Jacob and I must have had eyes as wide as saucers.

When he was finished with the can, he looked up and saw Jacob and me. A loud inhale turned into an animalistic hiss. He was clenching his teeth so hard that his jaw shook. There was a twitch inside him that crawled up from his waist and snarled up his back. His arms and head bobbed and contorted in inexplicable patterns. His eyes swam in their sockets as he tried to focus on us. He had the body of a man, but there was something very inhuman about him. He took heavy and irregular breaths, punctuated by desperate gasps of air. It was like he was fighting inside himself just to live.

He turned away from us as if he heard a sound in the distance. He broke into a run. His limbs stammering and shaking in a disjointed, yet frantic, gallop. He hit the end of the street—two hundred feet—in less than five seconds. The canister of ammonia sloshed caustic liquid in his wake. As he turned into the alley at the end of the street, another figure met him and then a third. They grouped together and disappeared over a dog-eared fence. We watched them run across the railroad tracks and sprint into the grass field by McClintock’s Tree Farm.

“What was he doing?” I said, looking up at Jacob. And Jacob had the TV face. His mouth was open, and his head was tilted to one side. His unblinking eyes watched the men disappear over the fence. “Jacob,” I said as I reached out to touch him.

Jacob’s trance disappeared, and he blinked slow. He turned his head and looked down at me. “He needed that stuff to take back to the Hollows… the anhydrous,” Jacob said.

“What was wrong with him?”

Jacob shrugged and looked back at the fence where the man disappeared. “I don’t know. Did you hear that fucker breathe? Sounded like a dying cow,” Jacob said. And he swiped the ball from me and turned towards the basket.

When we turned, Grandma was standing there holding a double-barreled Winchester. The gun was cracked open, and two fresh shells were resting inside the break action. The brass circles of the shells sparkled in the October sunshine. She stood for a long while intensely watching the men disappear into the tall-grass field.

She grabbed me by the neck and pulled me toward the driveway. I fell, and she kept pulling.

Once we were near the basketball hoop at the far end of the driveway, she let go: “If you were standing at the end of that tailgate, he would have killed you both. If you ever—ever! —see a person like that, you run. You get inside the house and lock the doors. There are things in this town, bad things. And don’t you think for a minute that just because you’re a kid, that thing wouldn’t open you up from belly button to Adam’s apple.”

Grandma took a long breath. She brought her hand to cover her eyes and let out a wobbly exhale. Grandma took me up and hugged me so hard I thought she broke my ribs.

“Why was he breathing like that?” Jacob asked.

Grandma looked back down the drive for a long while. She covered the sun from her eyes as she scanned the fences in the neighborhood. Then she looked at Jacob and I and shook her head. “He breathes like that because he’s dying. Been slowly dying for a long time. And one of these days, this whole damn town will be full of people like that.”

Grandma pulled the shells from the Winchester and snapped it shut. She slipped the shells in her coat pocket. She looked around and disappeared inside.

Grandma was a woman of idiosyncrasies. She had rules—live or die rules—that she never broke. She wouldn’t leave the house at night for any reason. She loved her two Alaskan Huskies, and listened to them like they were people. Responding to each one of their barks while in the house by looking out the shutters to inspect the neighborhood. There was a suspicious side to her, especially people in authority or control. I once saw her bolt from the Token-Oak hospital when a doctor tried to take her blood pressure. “I don’t trust him, and neither should you,” was all she ever said. It was like she expected the worst in people and searched for it everywhere. For a gregarious kid like me, that coldness was often grating. I could tell that beneath all Grandma’s issues, she loved us furiously.

Grandma and I butted heads like two rams on a mountain. She tried to keep me contained, and I was always busting out. She would correct me, and I’d fly off course. It was the ebb and flow of our dynamic.

After Grandma was inside, Jacob looked over at me. “Did you hear that shit? She is losing it,” Jacob said in a wobbly, effeminate voice, “the town will be full of people like that,” as he imitated Grandma standing with the Winchester. “She needs to be in a place for crazy people.”

After a while, Jacob and I were back to jail ball. Within minutes, I caught an elbow to the face and hit the pavement. I sprung up spraying profanities like a yard spreader. The curtains flew open, Grandma was standing in a dark kitchen. A vision of utter rage, she glared down upon us like the demon in Fantasia’s Night on Bald Mountain.

I was scared, but my anger outweighed my fear. What Jacob did was wrong, he was always wrong. I knew that she saw him, and yet she just stared. Grandma always cut him slack.

I waited until the curtain closed. Then it happened, the middle finger on my right hand extended and my arm shot up until my elbow straightened. Boom. There it was. I flipped my grandma off for only a split second. Turns out, that split second was enough.

Even Jacob, the twelve-year-old sadist, knew I’d made a tremendous mistake.

"You’re a dumbass,” Jacob said, “she saw that.”

“Whatever,” I said, holding the ball with both hands while leaning over.

I dismissed the thought and continued the game. Jacob began a new tactic, utterly uncharacteristic. He played softly, no longer pushing me around. It was like he wanted the game to end, just to see what would happen next. After five minutes of disinterested ball, we were done.

Jacob and I kicked our shoes off at the back door of Grandma’s house and stomped up the kitchen stairs. Grandma was standing at the sink and washing a set of dishes. Her back was facing me, and she did not offer her usual greeting.

I palmed the handle on the fridge door, yanking it open. A half-full container of cherry Kool-Aid was sitting on the top shelf whispering my name. I stood in the middle of the kitchen pouring the chilled, cherry goodness into a jelly jar. Grandma's back was toward me, her hunched shoulders wiggling as she scrubbed a pot in the sink. Jacob stood at the stove in between us. He had a subtle smile as he watched me.

As I took a drink of the cherry liquid, Jacob was the first to speak.

Jacob said, “Bob bent the garage door.”

This was such typical Jacob. His goal in life was to get people to lose it. He was gifted at this skill, like an aikido master throwing an attacking opponent off balance, Jacob knew just where, and how, to press. He kept memories of unhinged emotional responses in his mind like a running back keeps the game ball from a three-hundred-yard game.

"That's bullsh . . ." I said reflexively, only to be interrupted mid-profanity by Grandma's hand. She wheeled from the sink, flattened her palm, and threw a cat-quick right cross. It left the side of my face smashing my cheeks into my molars. All of this occurred in three-tenths of a second. Sometimes, life happens in a flash, but you remember it in excruciatingly slow detail. The way her fingers smashed the fatness of my cheek. How my lips curled as she followed through. The spinning jelly jar full of cherry Kool-Aid. Most of all, though, I remember the crime scene afterward.

Red Kool-Aid splattered all around the kitchen, in patterns so intricate that Jackson Pollock would've been jealous. The sunflower linoleum floor, the finger paintings hanging by magnets on the fridge, even the bubble screen on Grandma’s 9" kitchen TV were covered in the pitter-patter Kool-Aid splatter. The red stuff was everywhere, a fine mist of blood like someone’s head had exploded. I laid on the linoleum floor looking up at Grandma.

“It was Jacob… he did it,” I whimpered from the floor as I pointed at Jacob.

She towered over me with her right hand still cocked. Bending down, she calmed herself, and said the unforgettable words, “You can’t control yourself. It’s always someone else’s fault. And by the time you figure it out, I'll be dead."

Then Grandma leaned down and grabbed me by the collar of my T-shirt, pulled me closer, and said in a hissing whisper, “there is going to come a time, after I am dead when you’ll need Jacob. And he’ll be there. Family runs deep, and those bonds are forever. All this you’re going through is just training for what’s coming. And when it gets here, you’ll be thankful.”

Grandma wiped her hands off on a towel and walked out of the kitchen.

Jacob stood by the stove with an orgiastic smile. He had this look, an I’m-in-control-of-a-delicious-situation visage. His smile was so crooked and fulfilled, half his face looked like the Joker from Batman. It was a look that said, "told you so" and "eat shit" with seamless ferocity. The way his upper row of teeth glowed under his upper lip, the evil twinkle in his eye, even the way he held his head slightly upturned and to the side. For a twelve-year-old kid, he could play the douchebag card with uncanny skill.

“Fuck you, Jacob,” I said, sulking out of the kitchen.

I heard him laughing hysterically as I descended the basement stairs. He yelled after me, “Ahhh, Ba-aaaab, you going to need me someday. You’re welcome.”

The basement was the furthest spot in the house away from my grandmother, and she needed time to calm. The basement was quiet, had shag carpet, and puffy furniture. The house was not air-conditioned, but the basement was naturally cool. It was a place of respite from family dysfunction and summer heat.

At the base of the stairs, just to the left, there was my grandfather's office. A room unlike any other. Grandpa’s U-shaped desk had a glass top. He slid decades of old pictures and newspaper clippings under the glass. It was a tableau of his life and our family history. I sat in Grandpa’s office chair with my elbows on the desk, cradling my head in my hands.

Grandpa was a high school history teacher, county politician, and farmer. An avid democrat—the “party of the little people,” he always said—he believed in the common man and would rail against the machine any chance that he got. He supported inmates and single moms and small businesses. Most of all, he loved a good underdog story. After all, who is a bigger underdog than farming teacher with four kids and a penchant for taking on societal problems? He even ran for state senate a few times and lost. Badly. Through all his endeavors, he became part of the political machine. He wrote scathing letters to the editor in the local newspaper whenever he saw a person slighted by “big business, big government, or big bullshit.” People hated him or loved him. In his office, he kept mementos that he treasured dearly.

The history in that room was personal and honest. On the doorframe, all Grandpa’s children had penciled their height from toddler age to present day. Under the glass on the desk, there were hundreds of pieces of paper. One was an article about my great-grandpa who died when his arm was ripped off in a threshing machine. He bled to death in the wheat stubble of our home place field. His last note, scratched with a pocket knife onto a painted piece of John Deere green metal, read: “I love you all. I did my best.” There was a photo of my grandfather and Bill Clinton, where Clinton wrote so charmingly, “If I had supporters like you in every state, I’d be king.” There were the election results for state senate, where Gramps only brought in 27 percent of the vote, glued to the top of his campaign slogan that read simply: “I teach.” Grandpa was so proud of that slogan.

That room was Grandpa’s entire life, his sanctuary from the world. A physical manifestation of memories that told his story. There was not a single picture of my grandmother in that office. Other than the scribbled height of the kids on the doorframe, there were no pictures of any of Grandpa’s kids either. His story.

I sat in that office absorbing the history. My thoughts wandered to what Grandma had said about Jacob. I couldn’t envision a scenario when I would need him, the idea that I would be thankful for him was asinine. Just the thought made me clench my fists so hard that my fingernails dug into my palm leaving bloody imprints. I was so emotional, especially back then before the weight of time and responsibility largely suffocated my restlessness. I vowed to myself not to let Jacob get to me again, not to lose control, no matter what happened. I squinted my eyes hard—as if to force the goal into my head.

While I sat there in the basement, Grandpa came down the stairs and walked through the office door.

“Grandma tells me you shot her the bird . . .”

I nodded while looking at the floor.

“On the driveway…”

I nodded again.

“She tells me she slapped the holy hell out of you in the kitchen.”

I nodded again, still looking down.

“Well, she’s upstairs. Hands and knees up there cleanin’ up red shit off the cabinets. She must have busted you pretty good.”

“It’s Kool-Aid, Gramps.”

He laughed as only he could. “You left your mark on that room. Everyone will remember that slap and splatter.” And Grandpa walked over and patted me on the back. He told me to try to get along better with Jacob and “keep my head.”

Things repeated themselves over that year. So much that it was like living in a spin cycle. We were always together, Jacob and I, working the same dawn until dusk shift at the farm. Like too many familial relationships it was a forced shitshow that led to nowhere good. “Jacob and I” lit a neighbor’s pasture on fire and caused some damage to property. “Jacob and I” wrecked a farm truck. “Jacob and I” were caught stealing money from Grandpa’s wallet. “Jacob and I” stole beer from the fridge. There was always a lot more Jacob and a whole hell of a lot less of “I.” Though “I” was guilty by association.

Jacob and I never got along. I came to realize we never would. Jacob was drawn to pain and fear like an insect to bright light. He loved giving titty twisters that left scars for years. When he was really feeling froggy, which was often, he forced me to slap box him until my gums bled. You could never ride as a passenger in anything Jacob was driving, be it a four-wheeler, a pickup truck, or a bike. He would push the envelope of safety right up to the edge of death until you were in tears and begging to “make it stop.”

Grandma’s prediction about Jacob always hung in the back of my mind like a guilty thought. One of Grandma’s favorite sayings was that “everyone served a purpose.” Even Jacob. She was especially fond of reiterating that statement when Jacob got into trouble. I watched him deteriorate over the years—violent arrests, a stolen car, an arson charge for burning down a hundred-thousand-dollar grain elevator “just for shits and giggles.” Grandma kept saying “everyone serves a purpose. Everyone. Jacob slid so far into the abyss that even unconditional advocates like her began to wonder just what that purpose might be.

_____________

If there was a moment where Grandma realized Jacob would not be able to live a normal life, it was the pigs. That changed everything, that was it. Things went from dysfunctional to something more malevolent. It was the coup de grâce of Jacob’s sanity.

Jacob and I had just finished watching a comic book flick on the TV in the basement. A hackneyed yawner where the super-villain tied the hero to a post. The villain filled a trench with gas, and spent the last scene flipping a book of matches open and closed over the ditch while saying vague shit like “you think I wanted this,” “I’m a monster,” and “no one ever loved me.” The movie was boring and formulaic. Nonetheless, Jacob had “the face” while he mentally recorded the scene.

A few weeks later, he did it.

Jacob and I were playing near the pigpen. Grandpa had nestled the pen underneath a trio of thousand-year-old oaks right near the water pump. These trees were the oldest in the country. Massive oaks that had trunks so thick they were twelve feet across the middle Grandpa said the oaks were old even when he was a little boy and his dad had nicknamed them Comanche, Cherokee, and Apache after the warrior Indian tribes.

These three oaks were the centerpiece of the farm. They were so enormous, even in 1880, that the original homesteaders built the house so they could look upon the trees. They towered over the countryside each of them was over 150 feet tall and just as wide. They were never trimmed so their lower branches, thick as sidewalks, reached all the way to the ground. It was a rite of passage to climb to the top of Comanche’s tallest limb. We built a tree house about forty feet up, cupped by the branches of Apache like a father coddles a newborn babe.

As an adolescent, I read this short story from John Muir about riding out the fury of a thunderstorm in the peak of a tree. I climbed up Comanche in the middle of a prairie deluge. The branches dipped thirty feet in high winds. I clung to the trunk, my eyes glued to the horizon as lightening carpet-bombed the chalky hills along the Smoky River in an awesome show. Hugging that tree, I felt the power of nature and the delicateness of life at the same time.

I know this sounds clichéd and sophomoric. With my ear to the trunk of Comanche, I heard the call. It was the most invigorating experience of my life and lit a fire inside me I could never extinguish. I loved that tree since that day.

One summer, Comanche, Cherokee, and Apache started to die. They got an unknown disease that caused their leaves to fall off in the middle of summer. It happened fast, in just two weeks. The hulking relics stood there bald and naked, with three feet of green leaves piled up around them. I still remember Grandpa standing to look at the trio stripped bare and dying during the height of the growing season. They had, at least according to Gramps, been there for well over “five hundred years.” It was the end of an era that stretched longer from end to end than the American republic.

When those trees died, their leaves turned brown in a matter of days. The ground around the ancient trunks started to dry, and those poor pigs got hot. Even with the water pump dumping gallons of water onto the dirt, the ground began to flake and crack.

When Jacob dug his trench, that dirt was powder dry. He filled it with a line of red diesel. He stood over that trench for ten minutes, smoking a cigarette and flipping the box of matches open and closed.

“You think I give a fuck?” he said to me, imitating the supervillain from the movie with astounding skill.

He stared down into the box as if the answer was written in tiny letters along the side of a match. He finally pulled one and pinched it in his fingers, his eyes looking from the sulfur of the match-head to connect with mine. There was a flare in those eyes, a crazed glaze that was more akin to a rabid dog. He took a long draw off a cigarette he’d pilfered from Grandma. An inhale so deep, the smoke didn’t even come out when he next spoke.

“Grandpa always loved you more. You’re a soft little pussy. You'll hole up in the basement again. Eventually, he will come to pat you on the back.”

He took another long pull, this time letting the smoke drift out of his mouth only to be pulled back in two long tusks of smoke. He made his right arm wiggle forward as if it had no bones. It swung like Dumbo’s trunk. Only instead of a magic feather, there was a single wooden match.

“Ahhhhh,” he said with genuine satisfaction, “He will lose his goddamned mind. You can try to explain it. Just try.” He rubbed the back of his head with his palm and looked into the rolling hills of the pasture. Jacob had this look, kind of a contemplative stare into space where he’d raise his eyebrows and push out his chin. He would stay perfectly still while you looked at him. It was his I-am-a-deep-thinking-troubled-artist stare he probably bastardized from some B movie.

“I've enjoyed the pain,” he said. “Do you know that?”

I didn’t respond, that would have just made things worse.

Jacob lit the match then pinched it in his fingertips. His arm was completely extended. There was no bend in his elbow, Jacob let it burn slowly down without speaking. The flame of the match was, from my vantage point, perfectly between his eyes. Looking all the while past the flame at me.

“I love the fear—what’s crazy Jacob going to do next? Fear lasts. It stays with people. And causing it, creating it… Ahhhhh God, it’s the best feeling in the world.”

The flame touched his hand then. His eyelids squinted, and there was a moment I could have stopped it, maybe redirected his attention away from that trench filled with diesel, away from those pigs. I only could muster a single word.

“Jacob…”

He dropped the match with a theatrical snap of his wrist. The diesel lit with a low, blue flame that crawled across the ground. It slithered into the pigpen with silent grace, and when its tendrils touched the drippings on the grates of the pen, it went up with a whoosh. The flames tore through the cage, rolling across the pink bellies of the piglets.

The sound that came from there was unlike anything I've heard before or since.

It was a squealing cough full of agony. The smell of burning hair and shit was so harsh I had to cover my nose with my shirt. The sound of those piglets choking themselves as they tried to push through the square grates as they burned alive. That sound never left my ears. Every time I smell a pork chop or hear the grunt of an animal, the memory of that day comes squealing back.

Above the din of the burning pigs, I could hear the trees begin to burn. Those ancient oaks swaying violently as their branches scratched together like antlers of bucks fighting to the death. I looked up, and the trees bent and bowed as they began to burn.

The fire stretched from the pigpen to the base of Comanche. The trunk browned then blacked and popped embers as the fire licked up its branches. In less than a minute, the flames had clawed its way to the top and spread to Apache and Cherokee. The fireball was the size of a New York skyscraper.

I didn't try to run. When Grandpa came, I offered no explanation. I just sat there, eyes wide, as Jacob smoked Indian-style and leered. A single pillar of black smoke stretched from the blaze ten thousand feet into the sky. It was as if the arm of the devil reached out of hell to claw hands at the heavens above.

The grandparents committed Jacob to a mental hospital the very next day. There was no goodbye, no explanation. Just a silent sendoff that served as an acknowledgment of their fear of Jacob. He had progressively gotten worse. He had gone from general physical abuse to vandalization to animal torture to full-scale slaughter. In this linear progression, animals wouldn’t hold his attention much longer.

Looking back after all these years, I see that Grandma was right. Even a person as fuck-snap crazy as Jacob did have a purpose. There was a world where a kid that relished fear would have value. I didn’t know it then, but that world—with its suffocating nights and roving killing herds—had started to develop all around me. The seeds of the apocalypse had just sprouted, and addled roots of the dead oaks had just broken through the soil.

[self-made-blog-1]

Hey buddies!

I know I’ve been quiet on the site this week but that is because I have picked up a new hobby that I do for money. It’s actually not a hobby. I’m driving for Lyft. That is because I am now at one month and ten days without having a job, and I officially have no money and my credit card is almost maxed out (LOL).

So, in essence, I have been driving around with a Lyft sticker on the back windshield of my car, picking people up and putting them down. It’s not so bad really, if you’re into sitting in parking lots doing nothing until someone decides they need a ride to Wal-Mart. Or if you love driving around crowded city streets wasting gas. I think the wasting gas is my favorite part to be honest. I’m kidding. But you knew that.

The thing about being a Lyft driver is that I’m not very good at it. I mean, I think I just don’t know my area well enough. Also I suck at following google map directions. I went to pick someone up the other day and I had to turn around because as usual, they were calling from the area that I had just left. Google maps had me turn left down a sketch-as-heck one way street and when I reached the end, it had me turn left again. There was no traffic so I made the left turn and started to drive, when someone came into my lane and was driving directly toward me. I thought perhaps they were passing the person next to them, but I realized I was wrong when they started flashing their lights. I was actually the one driving the wrong way down a two-lane, one-way street. Amazing. I had nowhere to go so I just drove over into the median to avoid the oncoming traffic and that median was raised, hadn’t been mowed in forever and was narrow as heck. I got lucky that there was no traffic coming on the correct side of the road either, and I was able to just drive away into high noon without anyone noticing that I had no idea where I was or what I was doing.  I guess that when I signed up to be a Lyft driver I thought that there would be nothing to it. I was right. I just wish I could understand directions.

Speaking of understanding directions. If you’ve been keeping up with the posts over the last few weeks, then you’d know that not too long ago, I got plastered at a Pampered Chef party and bought a water bottle and I was hype about it at the time. Well. I didn’t have a job back then but Josh promised me that if I made it through the party that I could purchase an item up to $50 (even though I don’t have a kitchen) and I bought a water bottle because there is no reason why I would buy a kitchen tool for my future home when I could  buy yet another water bottle that I am never going to use and will ultimately throw in the trash?

It does have some like-able traits. It has numbered lines on the sides for measurement, like ounces on one side and mL on the other. Cool so people in the US and other countries can know how much water they’re  drinking. Props, pampered chef. It also has one of those straws that are super hard to clean and a french-press-esque plunger. It’s supposed to be for fruit infusions but with a little mesh it could be a cold brew french press water bottle.

Lately I’ve been borrowing a lot of money from Josh to pay my car bills and stuff and I have been feeling absolutely crushing guilt to the point where I can’t sleep at night and when I do sleep i literally have nightmares about him like talking cheese about me to my friends and it is driving me nuts.  Last night I was up at 3 a.m. listening to that new Marshmello/Bastille song and just crying over the music video over and over again.

I literally got a job and it doesn’t start until the 29th and it pays bi-weekly so even though I will be making the money very soon, it’s just not going to be soon enough.

And so, in light of that, I have been guilt-baking. I baked about four dozen cookies today and I made soup in the crock pot and I cleaned all day and I just feel so sweaty and agitated and I want to die LOL. Especially since I made some oatmeal cookies today and the batter just didn’t look right but I baked it anyway and instead of 12 cookies, a sheet of flat liquid came out so I formed it into a big ball and it made a scary and giant cookie ball but it tastes good and smells good. Here’s some pics:

  Okay so you guys can click here if you wanna cry about the music video but if you don’t want to cry, you should still click and just listen with your eyes closed because the song is actually a total bop, aside from the fact that Miranda Cosgrove is all I can think about now when I hear it.

As usual, thank you for reading tonight. Can’t wait to see you guys next week.

Love you, buds.

The Failure Chronicles: Part VI Hey buddies! I know I've been quiet on the site this week but that is because I have picked up a new hobby that I do for money.

[in-the-midst-of-everything]

Hey today was one fuck of a day!!!

Idk if I should bitch about it first or talk about yesterday, cuz yesterday was pretty good. But damn. Today just fucking sucks. I think I will do that first cuz ending with happy thoughts sounds like a better idea. And I gotta get this off my chest.

So we went to biolife yesterday and couldn't donate, so we both loaded up on iron and tried again today. Nothing. Both of us got turned away for one point below safe iron levels. Idk how?? I usually have good luck with donating, only if I haven't eaten enough I get turned away, but I had plenty of food in the prior 24 hours, ate a bowl of toasty-o's (80% daily iron value???) Which usually does the trick but nah. A wasted trip up to point, planned on coming home with $50 in gas money but NOPE. Now I'm down to 13 (?) on my biolife card and $75 to my name otherwise. That's it. That's all I got. So much for getting my shit sorted out in 2k18 cuz I am waaaaaaaaaaay behind on that plan. I have money coming from uncle Tim and Kathy, plus 2 art commissions I need to kick my ass into gear for, so I'll be ok but FUCK man. It's fucking July in a week and I'm STILL fucking scraping by

And I am PISSED at Sharon but I don't know how to tell her cuz I've been trained out of being confrontational my entire life and I don't wanna lose my damn job cuz she's been an absolute bitch lately. But I'm STILL getting half fucking paychecks cuz I guess I'm still paying off the forwarded money from this winter, I wasn't aware this would be going halfway the fuck into summer, I've drained my savings paying bills and fixing my fucking car I have next to nothing left. I can't buy food. I can't buy alcohol to cope, I can't do literally anything cuz I'm motherfucking broke. I was supposed to have money saved up to take the cats to the vet, get my motorcycle liscence and start looking for a bike, save money for a road trip this fall, but fuck ALL of that cuz I'm cruzing through the year by skin of my teeth.

And the big kicker, the motherfucking cherry on top, I haven't been getting my full 40 each week. Sharon has some kind of crisis going on that she's watching her money, so I missed 5 hours last week cuz she didn't have anything for me to do??? Bull fucking SHIT there is SO MUCH that needs to be done around that fucking place but she sent me home. ON TOP OF cutting my summer hours from 10/day to 9.5 to 9.75. Which isn't a huge change but really???? Just. WHY.

And I also mentioned she's been damn near unbearable all year so far, everything I thought she wanted from me is flipped now. I started clocking in right from the start 5 mins early. Cuz she specifically sat me down and told me last year she hated me being there on the dot, that I could punch in 5 mins early. Well now I guess I clock out early too, "just in case you go over time". Which is easy enough to fucking fix, just clock out sooner next day BUT WHATEVER. IDFK SHARON.

And I didn't say anything when she first told me this shit cuz I can't process information that fast and what it means on my end so I just agree on the spot and fuck myself over.

SO. I went into work today an hour later by her request, after a whole morning of low key panicking about money and doing the nasty ass dishes. She left almost immediately after showing me what to clean up by the big garage, and after I washed the rtv I fucked off and sat in the office with Holly for an hour. Cuz I needed someone to talk to, just bs with and not anything important. And it was pretty good. I had developed a migraine on the way home from point and chilling out in the office helped it. I spent the next 7 hours weed whacking the shit outta the mess around the big garage, pulling water line tubing from the matted grass, and organizing the trash into a burn pile and pick up pile. It sped time along really fast actually, and I was actually pretty ok for most of the day, aside from itchy, sweaty and frustrated. I cleaned the bathrooms at 10 and sat around wasting time for a bit to push my time to midnight to make the most out of my night, and on the walk back to put my shit away 2 things happened.

1st Sharon texted me at 11:40 asking if I was still cleaning bathrooms. Fucking yes, I have til midnight and I came in late, I'm not going over time in anyway ffs.

2nd one of Rome's buddies caught me on my way past and asked me over for a shot of his long island iced tea, which ofc I accepted. It was good, I haven't had hard liquor in so long it was actually really good. He asked what I was up to and told me about how Sharon busted them last night at 1am having fun in the camper. Cuz it was past "quiet time". On a Friday night, really Sharon? God, no fun allowed. He offered me a ride back to put my cleaning shit away, and I mentioned that I had to clock out and head home. Immediately after getting in my car I thought wtf, I should've made better conversation?? Like, at least act like I would hang around if they invited me, cuz I totally would, I've been so socially deprived lately it's not even funny. But I didnt??? I just was like....ya...I'm headed home. And he didn't push, but like. Idk. It all boils down to I have a paranoia about my image at the campground. As stupid as that sounds. But I'm literally always doing manual labor, usually focused on a job or have headphones as earplugs in so I can't talk (not that Sharon would let me anyway) and I leave right after I clock out cuz no one invites me over cuz I don't talk to anyone. Like I feel like my presence there isn't impacting literally anyone, I'm just the Employee That Does Work and that's it. And this paranoia was cemented recently when I finally followed the Facebook page, saw how often she updates and all the pics and videos she uses have like, Bill and Holly and other campers in them, she was showing off the jump pad and stuff and like...that wouldn't be there without me. I spent days digging the fucking trench for the electric line by hand, AFTER clearing the field and leveling the plot. AND I helped roll it out and set it up. Like idk I feel like I do all the hard work but don't get to join in any of the fun? And it just feels really shitty when none of your work is acknowledged. And going back to my intial(?) point, I'm so socially deprived and downright //lonely//. And I feel bad saying it cuz Hope and I live together, we're literally always sharing space together but I feel like I have no one else. Kenzie's barely existing being dragged down by work and money stress, I try to stay in close touch but it's hard. And out of this circle? Nothing. Kenzie has Dan and her coworkers to talk to, Hope is constantly on discord talking to the chat there, she tells me all about that. And I have...no one else. I message my sisters frequently but they're both insanely busy. I'm seeing Nikki and Cassy on Wednesday to help them move, but despite Nikki and I really hitting it off we don't actually talk regularly and that kinda makes me sad. But I'm conflicted there too, I'll rant in another post about that.

And idk. I'm just so. Genuinely. Lonely. I have no one to go see (not that I'd have the fucking time lmao) no one to talk to, starting new aquaintenceships is exhausting as all hell, and when I'm not around Hope I'm alone with my own thoughts. I've always been a loner, I'm comfortable in my own company and I can have fun by myself...but it's really taking a toll on me. Especially since Hope and kenzie seem like they can't keep up with me. I'm ready to do almost anything, anytime, but Hope needs several days' warning to do anything big and kenzies always tired. We managed a friend day out a couple weeks ago, we went out to Rabbit rock and I could've explored and climbed for another 2 hours, but their legs hurt and it was hot out, and they headed back to the car while I was still on the rock. There was plenty of daylight left and I would've loved to visit the woods or go hang at the lake, but we ended up heading back home and chilling at the apartment. Which was fine. I wasn't mad or anything, I just wanted more outside time. I miss the excitement, the sense of adventure. Kenzie and I made it out to the woods once this spring, and we didn't even wander. We just drove out to scope out the trails and left. And it's getting so hard to hang out in general, our work schedules never align and we're all broke af. I'm so exausted. I'm sick and tired of working our asses off but not getting ahead. We're all fucking behind yet despite all our efforts, it's just not good enough.

I came home tonight with all these thoughts knocking around in my head and doing all I could to hold back tears. Immediately grabbed my 2 beers from the fridge and got in the shower, tried to relax myself and drown out some of the panic, but it's not feeling like it's working. I'm just mildly dizzy Andy headaches coming back from crying. Idk what to do anymore. I have plans for once in my life but even the simplest goals are continuously just out of reach. I tell myself to just keep rolling with it, try to build momentum and you'll get there eventually. But I'm so far from making any headway. I'm keeping my head up but it's getting so, so hard....

[josephkitchen0]

Food Preservation Methods Got us Through the Great Recession

I should have made shirts declaring, I survived 2009. If I said that food preservation methods saved us, would you believe me?

How many of us don’t have scare stories from that year? 8.8 million jobs lost. Food and gas prices soared sky-high while home values plummeted. Reno, Nevada was hit hard by the Great Recession as businesses shut down like dominoes tumbling along our major thoroughfares. While unemployment rose, so did the number of homeless people walking past my house on a Tuesday to dig through my bins for recyclables before the garbage truck rumbled past. Every few days, strangers knocked on my door, offering to water my planter boxes in trade for a little cash. I turned them down because I didn’t have a dollar to spare.

An entire population struggled in limbo: employed but still unable to pay all the bills. Unemployed with nobody accepting applications. It just wasn’t enough and families were drowning in debt.

My husband had just lost a good job contract and his new employer paid entry-level wage. The kids, ages seven and nine, had a diet to address special needs; all that cheap nonperishable food was off limits. I was 32, just out of school and trying to build a career. And I had just been diagnosed with cancer.

Keep your heads up, they’d tell us. Someone has it worse. You could be on the streets.

We were lucky. We had a garden plot and I knew how to work the land.

Food Preservation Methods Save Every Penny

Kids aren’t born knowing how to pinch pennies. They don’t realize that every bite they refuse to eat is money you paid and will never get back. I pinched back words as edibles fell into the garbage can, but I wanted to scream.

The garden was good to us. Between clients, after picking kids up from school, I watered zucchini and tomatoes. After each doctor appointment and progressively worse diagnoses, I relaxed by pulling weeds from between carrots, sighing in satisfaction as noxious roots lifted from moist soil. Armloads of squash and peppers piled on the counter, ready to hit the frying pan.

But the waste! When you work that hard to bring in a harvest, you hate to see it fall into the trash can. Yes, we composted, but most of those leftovers were still edible. Then there were the ends, the tops, and that last bite of pasta in the pot that nobody wanted.

When I had bitten my tongue enough and too many frustrated words tumbled out, I researched food preservation examples. Something had to be done. I knew how to use a freezer bag, one of my favorite methods of preserving meat without a pressure canner. My mom dehydrated food when I was a kid, and that seemed easy enough. So, whatever could freeze, without becoming a bitter mess when thawed, went into plastic containers or zippered bags. Grapes from the back fence turned into jarred juice. The forced-air dehydrator received extra zucchini and fruit. I started to see more food hit the storage shelves than the garbage.

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A Food Preservation Method Arsenal

Who has time for all that?

Not me. The first cancer treatment was in September, right during harvest. Right when school started back up. Right when my husband wasn’t turning down any overtime, even if it kept him at work until midnight. Surgery put me down for a week. After that, I had to get right back up for work, to grow the food, to be a mom.

An arsenal lined my counter: methods of preserving food, all in a row, ready for use. The dehydrator sat on the left, next to plastic bags from sandwich size to one gallon. My water bath canner held clean jars and both vinegar and pectin waited in the cupboard.

Each evening, after cooking dinner and bringing in ripe and ready produce, I put the kids to bed. Then I started on my lineup. With each food preservation method ready, it didn’t take long. An hour each night tops. I scooped leftovers into lunch containers then loaded insulated bags for both kids and my husband. Food that didn’t need blanching met the knife then piled into freezer bags. If the food did need blanching, I had the pot and colander ready. And the dehydrator took care of all the zucchini tumbling out of the garden.

Zucchini chips are delicious. Have you tried them? Just take those extra squash, slice thinly, arrange in the food dehydrator, then flick the on switch and go to bed. Tell your husband to turn off the switch and load up a bag of chips before work. Dehydration allows the natural sugars to come through.

If I’d had a freeze dryer, I would have loaded that right up, as well, preserving the enzymes from summer peaches and green beans. I would have saved those fruit bits to make trail mix later.

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I learned how to ferment my garden radishes and cabbage into kimchi. How to simmer extra milk into cheese so it will store longer. I boiled bargain-bin chili peppers into hot sauce. I bought dry goods in bulk then oven canned them to seal away moisture and weevils.

Food Preservation Methods, For the Win

Did food preservation methods really save us?

We are grateful for so much that year: For an understanding landlady who let us work the garden. For friends who were also going through hard times and acknowledged the power of the barter system. And to the surgeon who successfully removed the cancer on Thanksgiving Day. On December 7th, I was announced officially cancer-free and ready to move into 2010.

My arsenal of food preservation methods kept leftovers out of the trash and put them in school lunches, saving a couple dollars each day. It saved $5 to $10 each time my husband microwaved a freezer container instead of hitting a fast food joint on his break. When we wanted something sweet, I popped the seal on a jar of applesauce made from a friend’s bountiful orchard. Dinner came from that extra sausage nobody wanted two weeks ago and that gallon of tomatoes from harvest, cooked with dehydrated herbs and piled on spaghetti. A $2 bag of cheesy poofs we could have bought was now a sandwich bag of zucchini chips. Food preservation methods kept us from resorting to processed food and it kept us out of the produce aisle with its $3/lb tomatoes.

Mostly, keeping those food preservation methods on the counter, ready to load up at the end of the day, saved my time. It often felt like it saved my sanity. It was a small factor in allowing me to keep living and move forward, to put a few pennies toward other bills, to just keep going.

Have you ever relied on food preservation methods to get through tough times? I want to hear your stories.

Food Preservation Methods Got us Through the Great Recession was originally posted by All About Chickens

[nancyedimick]

The Hearing Protection Act and ‘silencers’

A SilencerCo Osprey Micro silencer mounted on a Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistol. (SilencerCo)

Congress is considering the “Hearing Protection Act,” which would change federal regulation of gun “silencers.” Here’s a guide to some of the basic facts and relevant laws on the subject.

What is a “silencer”? Properly speaking, the devices are called “suppressors” or “moderators,” because guns that use them are still very loud, as will be detailed below. A sound suppressor is based on the principle you can see in a bathtub drain. Because water swirls when it goes down the drain, the rate of water flow is less than if the water just went straight down. The same principle can be applied to a gas. In a firearm, the bullet is propelled through the barrel and out the muzzle by expanding gas from burning gunpowder. As the gas exits the muzzle, it makes a very loud noise. If gas swirls on the way out, it exits more slowly. The slower exit reduces the noise of the gunshot.

Thus, a suppressor is a simple canister attached to the gun muzzle. Inside the canister are baffles, which make the gas swirl, producing less sound.

The first sound moderator came to market in 1909, under the name “Maxim Silencer.” The name was marketing hyperbole, like calling a flannel shirt an “Arctic coat.” The inventor, Hiram Percy Maxim, also applied his noise-moderating system to automobile mufflers and other machines whose gas emissions create noise. Today, the company Maxim Silencers does not make firearms silencers, but it does produce noise reducers for many other applications.

Noise reduction made shooting more pleasant in the short run, and protected hearing in the long run. President Theodore Roosevelt put a Maxim Silencer on his 1894 Winchester lever-action rifle.

How much is the noise reduced? By about 30 decibels, depending on the type of gun, ammunition and suppressor. Currently, gun control lobbies are claiming that if “silencers” are available, people will not be able to hear a mass shooting that is going on nearby. To test the claim, let’s consider last week’s attack on Republicans who were practicing baseball in Alexandria.

The criminal used a SKS rifle, with 7.62mm ammunition. Without a suppressor, the sound of a shot from such a gun is 165 decibels. This is more than twice as loud as a jet take-off, if you are 25 meters from the jet. With a suppressor, the SKS would be about 140db. That’s equivalent to being on an active aircraft carrier deck.

The would-be assassin also had a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun. In handguns, 9mm is an intermediate caliber — smaller and quieter than larger calibers such as .44 or .45 (inches). Without a suppressor, the S&W handgun is about 157 to 160 db. With a suppressor, that handgun would be around 127 to 130 db. That’s about the same as jackhammer. Thus, the assertions that people will not be able to hear criminal gunfire are not well supported by physics, although the assertions are consistent with how “silencers” are portrayed in movies.

(The specific decibel levels for particular guns were supplied by Jeremy Mallette, director of social media for Silencer Shop, a company in Austin.)

Advocacy for banning silencers. In the early 20th century, the most influential advocate for banning many firearms and accessories was William T. Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo. Using the resources of the Bronx Zoo and others for conservation, Hornaday helped save the American bison from extinction.

Hornaday’s 1913 book, “Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation,” warned that over-hunting was wiping out American wildlife. According to Hornaday, one problem was that modern guns were too accurate. Also, hunters now had better scopes and binoculars. In Wyoming, hunters were using silencers so one shot didn’t frighten away other game.

Even worse, in Hornaday’s view, was who was hunting. Namely, lower-class Americans and immigrants. He urged new laws to “prohibit the use of firearms by any naturalized alien from southern Europe until after a 10-years’ residence in America.” Wildlife was vanishing because “the Italians are spreading, spreading, spreading. If you are without them to-day, to-morrow they will be around you. Meet them at the threshold with drastic laws, thoroughly enforced.”

In the South, Hornaday argued, the problem was hunting by “poor white trash” and blacks. In an earlier time, black Americans “were too poor to own guns.” But “the time came when … single-shot breech-loading guns went down to five dollars a piece. The negro had money now, and the merchants … sold him the guns, a gun for every black idler, man and boy, in all the South.” Hornaday favored an Alabama proposal for an annual tax of at least $5 a year on every firearm, to prevent poor people from owning inexpensive guns.

Hornaday argued that all pump-action guns should be banned, as should all semi-automatics and all “silencers.” Some of Hornaday’s proposals did become law, in attenuated form. For example, states did not ban hunting by immigrant citizens, but they did enact laws against hunting or firearms possession by legal resident aliens. North Carolina enacted a statute (later repealed) that required a license for purchasing a pump action gun. (These laws are described in my article in the Harvard Journal on Legislation, Background Checks for Firearms Sales and Loans: Law, History, and Policy.)

The National Firearms Act of 1934. In 1934, Congress enacted the National Firearms Act, which used the tax power to set up a tax and registration system for certain arms and accessories. As enacted, the NFA applies to machine guns, short-barreled shotguns and rifles, “silencers,” grenades, mortars and various other devices.

As introduced in Congress, the NFA also covered handguns, which prompted a tremendous debate. Once handguns were removed from the bill, the NFA passed with little opposition.

In the legislative history, there was no discussion of “silencers.” We simply have no idea what (if anything) Congress thought it was doing about them. See Stephen P. Halbrook, Firearm Sound Moderators: Issues of Criminalization and the Second Amendment, 46 Cumberland Law Rev. 33 (2016).

Pursuant to the NFA, purchasing a suppressor today requires a $200 tax. Before a person takes possession of a suppressor, the suppressor must go through a months-long registration process with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. A person may not take a suppressor out of the state in which it was registered, unless the ATF gives advances written permission (a process that also takes months).

The Gun Control Act of 1968. As amended, the 1968 Act is the main federal law for ordinary firearms. For the GCA, suppressors are treated the same as ordinary firearms. Thus, the retail purchaser must fill out the dozens of questions in the four-page federal Form 4473, which includes questions about the purchaser’s race, and whether the purchaser is Hispanic. A false answer on the 4473 is punishable by five years in federal prison. 18 U.S. Code 924(a)(1).

The Form 4473 functions as a registration system, since the dealer must retain the form. The dealer’s registration forms may be examined by law enforcement officials in the course of criminal investigations or during regulatory compliance inspections. 18 U.S. Code 923(g).

Once the 4473 has been completed, the retailer contacts the FBI or a state counterpart by Internet or by telephone. The law enforcement agency conducts a background check by comparing the buyer’s name to various lists of “prohibited persons.” These include persons with felony convictions, domestic violence misdemeanors, illegal aliens, dishonorable discharges from the military, and so on.

Sometimes the “instant check” is completed in less than 20 minutes. Other times, the wait time to initiate the check can be hours or days. If the lawful buyer has the same name as a prohibited person, there may be delays of days or months.

To repeat: A suppressor purchaser must go through the same procedures as an ordinary firearms buyer (Gun Control Act) and the same procedures as a machine gun buyer (National Firearms Act).

This is an unusually stringent pair of systems. Most firearms accessories (e.g., scopes) have no special rules for purchase. The default rule is to have controls on the firearm, and not to bother with extra rules for accessories.

State laws. As long as a person complies with the NFA and the GCA, suppressor ownership is legal in almost all states. The exceptions are Hawaii, California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. In the 42 states where suppressors are legal, they are allowed for hunting in all but two (Connecticut and Vermont). (See this map from the American Suppressor Association.) The number of states that allow possession of suppressors, including for hunting, has grown in recent years, in part due to the lobbying of the NFA Freedom Alliance, a group that concentrates on item covered by the NFA.

Why do people own suppressors? There are three main reasons: reduction of noise pollution, hearing protection and safety training. As for the first, hunting sometimes take place in state or national forests or other locations near where people live. During hunting season, nearby residents may be annoyed by the frequent sound of gunfire. Likewise, some people have built houses near established target ranges; when people at the range use suppressors, the ambient noise is reduced, although certainly not eliminated.

Since the 1950s, many shooters haven’t used hearing protection. As people have become more health conscious, they have recognized that gunfire can damage the inner ear. Accordingly, use of hearing protection when shooting has become standard and is mandatory at public ranges. Earmuffs reduce the felt decibel level by about 20 to 30 decibels, depending on the model. Today, best practices are to supplement over-the-ear muffs with foam inserts into the ear. By themselves, ear plugs are usually not as effective as earmuffs, but they do provide some additional protection.

Suppressors reduce noise by about as much as earmuffs do. No one would ever suggest that a suppressor is an acceptable replacement for muffs, but suppressors are a very good supplement to reduce the sound the reaches the inner ear. Using a suppressor + earmuffs + ear plugs can reduce the perceived sound to around 100 decibels, the same as a power lawn mower.

Finally, firearms safety instructors often prefer that their students use suppressors. First of all, suppressors reduce overall noise, which makes it easier for students to hear the instructor. Second, some new shooters flinch because of the sharp noise of a gun when it is fired. A suppressor can prevent a flinch from developing and thus help students progress more quickly to proper and safe shooting form.

How many people own suppressors? As of November 2006, the number of suppressors in the ATF’s registry was 150,364. By February 2016, the number had risen to 902,805. These numbers are not as precise as they might appear, since the ATF has acknowledged that its National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record registry (NFRTR) is riddled with errors; items that were properly registered with the ATF at some point may not appear on the current ATF registry. Regardless, there is no doubt that suppressors have become much more popular, especially with hunters, as CNN has reported.

What is the rate of crime with suppressors? A study of federal prosecutions for 1995-2005 , using Westlaw and Lexis, found 153 total “silencer” prosecutions. “[M]ore than 80 percent of federal silencer charges are for non-violent, victimless crimes.” Paul A. Clark, Criminal Use of Firearms Silencers, 8 Western Criminology Review 44 (2007). In other words, the possessor was a prohibited person (not allowed to possess firearms, ammunition or silencers), but the possessor was not misusing the item. In only 2 percent of the cases was the firearm discharged. The author noted that most prosecutions involved improvised, home-made silencers, rather than the commercially manufactured kind that can be purchased in gun stores. The article’s analysis of California cases from 2000-2005 found similar results. Thus, the misuse rate for lawfully purchased suppressors appears to be very low.

What are the laws in other countries? American suppressor law is anomalous, because suppressors are accessories yet are treated the same as firearms (Gun Control Act). On top of that, they are also treated like machine guns (National Firearms Act). As Halbrook’s article details, in European nations such as Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Britain, among others, an individual who is licensed to own a firearm is always allowed the appropriate suppressor. Many European guns are sold with suppressors already attached. The policy is that if a person is legally authorized to possess a firearm, then it is generally preferable for that firearm to have a suppressor.

What is the Hearing Protection Act? In the current Congress, the Hearing Protection Act (HPA), or H.R. 367 in the House (sponsored by Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C.) and S, 59 in the Senate (sponsored by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho). The HPA retains all of the Gun Control Act’s provisions on suppressors. In other words, purchasing a suppressor would continue to be subject to all the rules that apply to purchasing or possessing an ordinary firearm.

The HPA removes suppressors from the National Firearms Act, which means buyers would not have to pay a $200 tax and would not have to go through a months-long federal registration process.

The HPA does not preempt the laws in the states that prohibit suppressor possession. It does say that in states where suppressors are lawful, states may not impose additional registration requirements or special taxes.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/06/19/the-hearing-protection-act-and-silencers/

[wolfandpravato]

The Hearing Protection Act and ‘silencers’

A SilencerCo Osprey Micro silencer mounted on a Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistol. (SilencerCo)

Congress is considering the “Hearing Protection Act,” which would change federal regulation of gun “silencers.” Here’s a guide to some of the basic facts and relevant laws on the subject.

What is a “silencer”? Properly speaking, the devices are called “suppressors” or “moderators,” because guns that use them are still very loud, as will be detailed below. A sound suppressor is based on the principle you can see in a bathtub drain. Because water swirls when it goes down the drain, the rate of water flow is less than if the water just went straight down. The same principle can be applied to a gas. In a firearm, the bullet is propelled through the barrel and out the muzzle by expanding gas from burning gunpowder. As the gas exits the muzzle, it makes a very loud noise. If gas swirls on the way out, it exits more slowly. The slower exit reduces the noise of the gunshot.

Thus, a suppressor is a simple canister attached to the gun muzzle. Inside the canister are baffles, which make the gas swirl, producing less sound.

The first sound moderator came to market in 1909, under the name “Maxim Silencer.” The name was marketing hyperbole, like calling a flannel shirt an “Arctic coat.” The inventor, Hiram Percy Maxim, also applied his noise-moderating system to automobile mufflers and other machines whose gas emissions create noise. Today, the company Maxim Silencers does not make firearms silencers, but it does produce noise reducers for many other applications.

Noise reduction made shooting more pleasant in the short run, and protected hearing in the long run. President Theodore Roosevelt put a Maxim Silencer on his 1894 Winchester lever-action rifle.

How much is the noise reduced? By about 30 decibels, depending on the type of gun, ammunition and suppressor. Currently, gun control lobbies are claiming that if “silencers” are available, people will not be able to hear a mass shooting that is going on nearby. To test the claim, let’s consider last week’s attack on Republicans who were practicing baseball in Alexandria.

The criminal used a SKS rifle, with 7.62mm ammunition. Without a suppressor, the sound of a shot from such a gun is 165 decibels. This is more than twice as loud as a jet take-off, if you are 25 meters from the jet. With a suppressor, the SKS would be about 140db. That’s equivalent to being on an active aircraft carrier deck.

The would-be assassin also had a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun. In handguns, 9mm is an intermediate caliber — smaller and quieter than larger calibers such as .44 or .45 (inches). Without a suppressor, the S&W handgun is about 157 to 160 db. With a suppressor, that handgun would be around 127 to 130 db. That’s about the same as jackhammer. Thus, the assertions that people will not be able to hear criminal gunfire are not well supported by physics, although the assertions are consistent with how “silencers” are portrayed in movies.

(The specific decibel levels for particular guns were supplied by Jeremy Mallette, director of social media for Silencer Shop, a company in Austin.)

Advocacy for banning silencers. In the early 20th century, the most influential advocate for banning many firearms and accessories was William T. Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo. Using the resources of the Bronx Zoo and others for conservation, Hornaday helped save the American bison from extinction.

Hornaday’s 1913 book, “Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation,” warned that over-hunting was wiping out American wildlife. According to Hornaday, one problem was that modern guns were too accurate. Also, hunters now had better scopes and binoculars. In Wyoming, hunters were using silencers so one shot didn’t frighten away other game.

Even worse, in Hornaday’s view, was who was hunting. Namely, lower-class Americans and immigrants. He urged new laws to “prohibit the use of firearms by any naturalized alien from southern Europe until after a 10-years’ residence in America.” Wildlife was vanishing because “the Italians are spreading, spreading, spreading. If you are without them to-day, to-morrow they will be around you. Meet them at the threshold with drastic laws, thoroughly enforced.”

In the South, Hornaday argued, the problem was hunting by “poor white trash” and blacks. In an earlier time, black Americans “were too poor to own guns.” But “the time came when . . . single-shot breech-loading guns went down to five dollars a piece. The negro had money now, and the merchants . . . sold him the guns, a gun for every black idler, man and boy, in all the South.” Hornaday favored an Alabama proposal for an annual tax of at least $5 a year on every firearm, to prevent poor people from owning inexpensive guns.

Hornaday argued that all pump-action guns should be banned, as should all semi-automatics and all “silencers.” Some of Hornaday’s proposals did become law, in attenuated form. For example, states did not ban hunting by immigrant citizens, but they did enact laws against hunting or firearms possession by legal resident aliens. North Carolina enacted a statute (later repealed) that required a license for purchasing a pump action gun. (These laws are described in my article in the Harvard Journal on Legislation, Background Checks for Firearms Sales and Loans: Law, History, and Policy.)

The National Firearms Act of 1934. In 1934, Congress enacted the National Firearms Act, which used the tax power to set up a tax and registration system for certain arms and accessories. As enacted, the NFA applies to machine guns, short-barreled shotguns and rifles, “silencers,” grenades, mortars and various other devices.

As introduced in Congress, the NFA also covered handguns, which prompted a tremendous debate. Once handguns were removed from the bill, the NFA passed with little opposition.

In the legislative history, there was no discussion of “silencers.” We simply have no idea what (if anything) Congress thought it was doing about them. See Stephen P. Halbrook, Firearm Sound Moderators: Issues of Criminalization and the Second Amendment, 46 Cumberland Law Rev. 33 (2016).

Pursuant to the NFA, purchasing a suppressor today requires a $200 tax. Before a person takes possession of a suppressor, the suppressor must go through a months-long registration process with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. A person may not take a suppressor out of the state in which it was registered, unless the ATF gives advances written permission (a process that also takes months).

The Gun Control Act of 1968. As amended, the 1968 Act is the main federal law for ordinary firearms. For the GCA, suppressors are treated the same as ordinary firearms. Thus, the retail purchaser must fill out the dozens of questions in the four-page federal Form 4473, which includes questions about the purchaser’s race, and whether the purchaser is Hispanic. A false answer on the 4473 is punishable by five years in federal prison. 18 U.S. Code 924(a)(1).

The Form 4473 functions as a registration system, since the dealer must retain the form. The dealer’s registration forms may be examined by law enforcement officials in the course of criminal investigations or during regulatory compliance inspections. 18 U.S. Code 923(g).

Once the 4473 has been completed, the retailer contacts the FBI or a state counterpart by Internet or by telephone. The law enforcement agency conducts a background check by comparing the buyer’s name to various lists of “prohibited persons.” These include persons with felony convictions, domestic violence misdemeanors, illegal aliens, dishonorable discharges from the military, and so on.

Sometimes the “instant check” is completed in less than 20 minutes. Other times, the wait time to initiate the check can be hours or days. If the lawful buyer has the same name as a prohibited person, there may be delays of days or months.

To repeat: A suppressor purchaser must go through the same procedures as an ordinary firearms buyer (Gun Control Act) and the same procedures as a machine gun buyer (National Firearms Act).

This is an unusually stringent pair of systems. Most firearms accessories (e.g., scopes) have no special rules for purchase. The default rule is to have controls on the firearm, and not to bother with extra rules for accessories.

State laws. As long as a person complies with the NFA and the GCA, suppressor ownership is legal in almost all states. The exceptions are Hawaii, California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. In the 42 states where suppressors are legal, they are allowed for hunting in all but two (Connecticut and Vermont). (See this map from the American Suppressor Association.) The number of states that allow possession of suppressors, including for hunting, has grown in recent years, in part due to the lobbying of the NFA Freedom Alliance, a group that concentrates on item covered by the NFA.

Why do people own suppressors? There are three main reasons: reduction of noise pollution, hearing protection and safety training. As for the first, hunting sometimes take place in state or national forests or other locations near where people live. During hunting season, nearby residents may be annoyed by the frequent sound of gunfire. Likewise, some people have built houses near established target ranges; when people at the range use suppressors, the ambient noise is reduced, although certainly not eliminated.

Since the 1950s, many shooters haven’t used hearing protection. As people have become more health conscious, they have recognized that gunfire can damage the inner ear. Accordingly, use of hearing protection when shooting has become standard and is mandatory at public ranges. Earmuffs reduce the felt decibel level by about 20 to 30 decibels, depending on the model. Today, best practices are to supplement over-the-ear muffs with foam inserts into the ear. By themselves, ear plugs are usually not as effective as earmuffs, but they do provide some additional protection.

Suppressors reduce noise by about as much as earmuffs do. No one would ever suggest that a suppressor is an acceptable replacement for muffs, but suppressors are a very good supplement to reduce the sound the reaches the inner ear. Using a suppressor + earmuffs + ear plugs can reduce the perceived sound to around 100 decibels, the same as a power lawn mower.

Finally, firearms safety instructors often prefer that their students use suppressors. First of all, suppressors reduce overall noise, which makes it easier for students to hear the instructor. Second, some new shooters flinch because of the sharp noise of a gun when it is fired. A suppressor can prevent a flinch from developing and thus help students progress more quickly to proper and safe shooting form.

How many people own suppressors? As of November 2006, the number of suppressors in the ATF’s registry was 150,364. By February 2016, the number had risen to 902,805. These numbers are not as precise as they might appear, since the ATF has acknowledged that its National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record registry (NFRTR) is riddled with errors; items that were properly registered with the ATF at some point may not appear on the current ATF registry. Regardless, there is no doubt that suppressors have become much more popular, especially with hunters, as CNN has reported.

What is the rate of crime with suppressors? A study of federal prosecutions for 1995-2005 , using Westlaw and Lexis, found 153 total “silencer” prosecutions. “[M]ore than 80 percent of federal silencer charges are for non-violent, victimless crimes.” Paul A. Clark, Criminal Use of Firearms Silencers, 8 Western Criminology Review 44 (2007). In other words, the possessor was a prohibited person (not allowed to possess firearms, ammunition or silencers), but the possessor was not misusing the item. In only 2 percent of the cases was the firearm discharged. The author noted that most prosecutions involved improvised, home-made silencers, rather than the commercially manufactured kind that can be purchased in gun stores. The article’s analysis of California cases from 2000-2005 found similar results. Thus, the misuse rate for lawfully purchased suppressors appears to be very low.

What are the laws in other countries? American suppressor law is anomalous, because suppressors are accessories yet are treated the same as firearms (Gun Control Act). On top of that, they are also treated like machine guns (National Firearms Act). As Halbrook’s article details, in European nations such as Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Britain, among others, an individual who is licensed to own a firearm is always allowed the appropriate suppressor. Many European guns are sold with suppressors already attached. The policy is that if a person is legally authorized to possess a firearm, then it is generally preferable for that firearm to have a suppressor.

What is the Hearing Protection Act? In the current Congress, the Hearing Protection Act (HPA), or H.R. 367 in the House (sponsored by Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C.) and S, 59 in the Senate (sponsored by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho). The HPA retains all of the Gun Control Act’s provisions on suppressors. In other words, purchasing a suppressor would continue to be subject to all the rules that apply to purchasing or possessing an ordinary firearm.

The HPA removes suppressors from the National Firearms Act, which means buyers would not have to pay a $200 tax and would not have to go through a months-long federal registration process.

The HPA does not preempt the laws in the states that prohibit suppressor possession. It does say that in states where suppressors are lawful, states may not impose additional registration requirements or special taxes.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/06/19/the-hearing-protection-act-and-silencers/

[tomupside]

In Response to a Question

Chris: Tell me a story about your father.

 Me: I honestly can't narrow it down. There are too many to chose from. The trips to the swimming pools, where he would spend hours devastating us and our friends as the Kid Catapult. The nights pretending to "sneak" us into the drive-in theater. The innumerable Dad Jokes. The memories of comical embarrassments and times where we pissed him off with our Typical Teenage Angst (yes, even a D&D geek like me found ways to test the limits of his No Kill policy. lol )

Chris: [more insistent] Tell me a story about your father . . . Me: [wry chuckle]

 It's gonna be a long one . . .

 [deep breath]

 It's the trips to the pool that always stand out the most vividly for me. Piqua wasn't much of a city even when I was living there, but the pool was always a spot of joy. Before my stepmom came into the picture, it was just Dad, me and my two sisters; before he was a firefighter, he worked a third-shift job at Hartzel Propeller -- one of only a half dozen factories in the town (and still one of the only ones left today.) He'd put in a solid eight-plus hour night, only to come home to several kids who, since these were the days before we had cable, demanded all of the attention. Since my middle sister had a serial killer's sense of glee and affinity for poisons, he'd "sleep" on the couch through those mornings and afternoons as we played across that living room.

Most people, when reminiscing, recall their 20s as sleepless nights closing down the bars and early mornings in class, and wondering how they had the energy to do it all as they wrangle their kids with no small amount of exhaustion. My Dad kind of skipped that step and went straight to exhaustion and kids. Sometimes we would let him sleep. Sometimes. Not often, though. Most times, it’d be not at all. Back then, we didn’t really have Air Conditioning. We barely had a television. And it would be a LONG time before we had video games. And since our neighborhood wasn’t exactly “kid friendly,” there wasn’t much else for us to do.

Sometimes we'd be content with just ourselves; other times, we'd insist on him being our personal interactive jungle gym. And we were not gentle monkeys. He engendered a sort of bestiality in our play that still prevails with kids to this day. Don't know why that was. Don't know why that is, still. Maybe because he always seemed like he could take it. Like he was indestructible. Not that we didn’t love to test the limits of his indestructibility! It was always a particular joy when we got to help him sort out his back – which almost always involved us doing frog splashes from the couch to his spine. He said that it helped, but several decades later, that man would slip a disk and have to get steel rods to put his back into place, and I'm sure we deserve more than a little responsible for that.

But summertime was particularly exciting! Summer meant the swimming pool. That sacred ground where we could truly let loose without worrying anything (or anyone) getting broken! There, Dad could be Most Fun Dad Ever!

Looking back, I recall all the Hell we put my Dad through, and it exhausts and terrifies me in equal portions.

Dad had a rule: we couldn't go to the pool unless it was over 80-degrees. Which, in hind sight, was a clever move on his part. Even in July, it rarely broke 80 before Noon, which gave him at least the opportunity for four hours of sleep. So we kids would press close to our 1970s Magnavox two-ton historic monstrosity, transfixed on the weather channel, watching the thermometer as it ticked back and forth and up and down, waiting for that single magical moment when 79-degrees became 80 and released us from the spell which bound us to the house!

But when it hit 80 – and it inevitably did – it never mattered the work night Dad had or the sleep he never got or the sores or the calluses or the back pains. We'd be a murder of crows, pecking and pawing and screeching away – "LOOK! IT'S 80!" (because it would sometime slip back down to 79 a couple of times before it actually stuck, so we had to be sure he saw it as soon as possible, otherwise he'd grumble and go back to sleep, and we'd have to wait a hole five minutes more!)

And he'd have no choice. He was Super Dad. Also, we were loud and whined and were insistent, and he would know no peace if he didn't relent. So he'd wake as best as he could, and we'd gleefully dress in whatever hand-me-down swimming suits we could find; then we'd help him line the cooler with ice and stuff it with packaged lunch meats and breads and condiments and drinks, and sometimes those freezie ices that came in the clear plastic tubes that you used to have to rip the tops off of and squeeze out like frozen colored-sugar toothpaste. And we'd pile in our 1980s Pontiac Bonneville – the Great Grey Whale – and drive down to the great shining beacon of summer memories!

Aside from the water slide, the pool hasn't changed all that much from when we were ankle-biters. Compared to others I’ve visited since then, it really wasn’t all that special. But oh, how wonderful it seemed then! 100-plus yards of Z-shaped concrete joy, gradating from The Shallow End at the bottom of the Z to The Deep End at the top of the Z, with two normal sized diving boards and one High Dive that wouldn't stop scaring the shit out of me until well into high school (and still gives me the heeby jeebies to look at it.)

Zones of grass were on either corner, where sun-bathers laid out upon blankets and kids played tag and the grass never stayed green for very long with the constant watering with chlorine and spilled pop and god knows what else.

There were two zones: The Flat Grass, which now has the slide nearby and was nearer the diving boards, and was always prime real estate because it was away from the trees and gave you the clearest runway for a running cannonball, and it was flat and the grass usually stayed greener for longer, and the people were generally better and always took care to clean up their area; unlike The Bad Grass, which was hilly, bumpy, usually littered with pebbles, and nearer to the locker rooms which never didn't smell, and the people always left their trash everywhere, except us when we were there, because we were natural-born Flat Grassers – except when we did leave our trash everywhere, because hell, everyone else was, so why shouldn't we?

Near the entrance and to the right were locker rooms that only a cave troll would find homey, with almost no lights save for whatever sunlight slipped through, and tiled floors that always felt like you'd get Athletes Foot if not for the protective layer of chlorine and urine. To the left of the entrance, past the forest of umbrella tables if you were coming from the Flat Grass area, there was a snack bar, with candy bars for a quarter and pop for 50-cents and tiny bags of chips for a little more than a dime and I-can't-remember-how-much for hot dogs and pretzels; and absolutely no shade, so your feet would be sizzling from the sun-baked concrete as you waited in that line which was always terrible, because there was never a day when the pool wasn't elbow-to-elbow with old people and teenagers and kids and toddlers and parents and the occasionally curious goose. Too many days I'd come back to the grass, and the soles of my feet looked like griddle cakes.

If you were smart and had a friend with you in line, you'd each take turns holding each other's place so you could dunk your feet in the water to cool them off. You learned quickly to wait to get your snacks either right before or right after Adult Swim. Otherwise, you'd be standing there with the skin of your feet melting to that jagged concrete, sun mocking you from a million miles up as you inched your way towards the front, hoping like hell that you'd get through before they blew the whistle for All Swim.

Oh, and it was ALWAYS a tense bit of drama, too. Because as soon as that whistle blew, it didn't matter if you were middle of the line or back of the line or in the middle of putting your order in, you'd sprint like reflex back into the pool and dive in without a second thought to the hot dogs you were leaving behind or the wadded dollar bill tucked in your pocket that were sure to lose now. You couldn't help yourself! It was reflex! Pavlov was right, every time!

If we got there soon enough, before every other kid was able to get their parents to see that yes, it was indeed 80 degrees, and remind them that they'd promised – PROMISED – to take them to the pool, we would get a spot right in the perfect middle of the Flat Grass – setting up like pro gypsies: Dad laying out his towel right in the middle of our camp, with the cooler setting away from the pool so he could keep an eye on us; and us laying out our towels on either side of the cooler, so we could have easiest access to snacks and drinks. And we'd slather ourselves with SPF as fast and as thoroughly as we could, then were off to the water like ducks after migration – leaving Dad to "mind the cooler."

Which we didn't catch on until later meant that he was going back to sleep – the clever man. He knew we'd all be so busy swimming that he'd at least be able to get in at least an extra hour (total) of decent-ish sleep before he had to go back to being Super Dad. It wouldn't be until I was an adult myself that I understood how he was able to sleep through any of it. With all of the squeals and cries and splashes, and the 50s Doo-Wap and 60 bubblegum pop piping over the intercom, a roar could barely be heard as a whisper. Then I started third shift at a gas station, and then as a server administrator, and now wonder how he went as long WITHOUT falling asleep!

Not that we gave him much opportunity to sleep, though. Because before long we'd be after him to join us. Sometimes it was just us kids; sometimes, it was us and all of our friends; sometimes it would be random kids we pulled in to help us out. But it was always the same game:

Try to Drown the Sea Monster.

The object was simple: Dad was a sea monster, and we had to try and drown him.

Any.

Way.      

Possible.

(Except biting, scratching, kicking, punching, pinching, clawing, or head-butting. Otherwise, it was Anything Goes.)

We'd go for the knees and attack the calves; we'd coordinate diversionary splash attacks and pile on for a mass tackle assaults with military precision. We'd send wave after wave of other kids to wear him down so we could make the finishing blow! But it was no use! With him being almost 200 pounds heavier and four feet taller than all of us put together, he'd power through it all like a Sicilian Godzilla with a Magnum PI mustache, and with our best efforts shrugged off and our forces scattered, we could only scream and flee helplessly as he'd snatch us out of the water, heave us HIIIIIIIGH into the air, and send us sailing as far as our scrawny, aerodynamic bodies could go. And MAN, could he THROW! Professionals still pour over videos of those days, trying to categorize each maneuver and nuance! He was an artist, and throwing kids was his canvas!

And we'd have that man attacking us for HOURS, to the point where he perfected his technique to Olympian perfection! Sometimes, I could almost be parallel with the top of the high dive, and have enough hang time to contemplate the deeper meanings of life and all the ways we were interconnected in this invisible ocean of particles and happenstance, and wonder whether alternate versions of me were handing as high in the air as me or if they were sailing above other swimming pools or even oceans and I wonder what the ocean would look like from up so high and do dolphins ever wonder about these things and oops here comes the water -- SPLASH!!! God, the days when I was skinny enough to be tossed so high!

This would go on until three curt whistles signaled for us kids to get the hell outta the pool – it was ADULT SWIM!

During Adult Swims, we'd begrudgingly shuffle back to camp – after all, it wasn't like any adults ever really SWAM during Adult Swims, so why couldn't we KEEP swimming?, it was so unfair! – where Dad would fix us sandwiches and helped us with our freeze pops, and sometimes let us have cookies or whatever additional snack he brought. One time, he even packed a giant five pound slab of Hershey chocolate bar that he'd picked up in Hershey, Pennsylvania; which he chopped up for us as best as he could (considering it was like a brick from being in the freezer and then the cooler) and let us nom on (which was also like EATING a brick from being in the freezer and the cooler.) God, I remember that candy bar lasting us for DAYS!

And we'd eat and hydrate, and he'd help us re-slather the sunscreen and chastise my sisters for trying to drown one another and me for blowing my nose in my hand and wiping it on the side of my swimsuit – because it didn't matter how much pool water was up there, that shit was disgusting and also he was a single dad so I was probably scaring away prospective chicks (that last bit I made up, but probably wasn't too wrong.)

And then that long, single whistle would blow, and we'd be back at it again! We'd go at him with all the force of werewolves, and he'd toss us like a Scotsman tosses logs. And we'd land with the grace of water comets, drown a bit as we regained our bearings; then, once our senses had returned and we'd wiped the chlorine snot on our swimming suits, we'd dive to the bottom and engage our submarine assaults and tiger shark attacks, and continue until Adult Swim. Then recharge. Then back in the water. Then back out. For hours!

And Dad would let us! He never got tired! Or if he did, he rarely let it show enough. He had the endurance of a pack mule and heave of an Irish bouncer! I look back to those pictures of him and how skinny he was, and how massive his forearms were, and like to think those Summer afternoons were the reason for all of that.

Then, around five-ish or six, when the sun was starting to creep downwards and the heat was starting to break, we'd go until one last Adult Swim. Bruised, beaten, mostly bloated from almost drowning, and VERY begrudgingly, we'd towel ourselves down, lace up our shoes (because we didn't have sandals, because hey, what did Dad look like, a Money Tree? Shoes were good enough!) and head back to the car, where we'd be soaked and shivering and wrapped in towels but still dripping through the towels and soaking the chairs, and Dad would listen to Jimmy Buffet's "Why Don't We Get Drunk" and swiftly mute the volume every time it would get to the line "and screw", replacing it with something innocuous like "and tickle your!" or "and spew!" all through the short drive home.

I know it's not a single memory. I have more – so many more. If love is weighed in deeds, then my Dad has thrown the world off its tilt. Maybe I'll share some of them next time, next Father's Day. For now, I think I'm going to sit here a little longer, and wax a little nostalgia.

 Tom Upside

- Finally beginning to understand the appeal of The Wonder Years

[icedteaandoldlace]

I was tagged by @firewolfi

Rules: Answer the questions and tag 20 amazing followers you’d like to get to know better!

Name: Allison

Nicknames: Allie, Al, Aloicious, Cat/Bunny Whisperer, George, Thin Mint

Zodiac Sign: Pisces

Height: 5'8"

Orientation: Asexual (heteroromantic).

Ethnicity: Southern American (not to be confused with South American).

Favorite Fruit: Probably watermelon, but I love all sorts of fruits.

Favorite Season: Fall

Favorite Book: Clockwork Princess (book 3 of The Infernal Devices) by Cassandra Clare.

Favorite Flower: Most flowers, tbh, but lately I’ve been really into hyacinths.

Favorite Scent: Black raspberry and vanilla, coffee grounds, rose petals, line dried laundry, bluebonnets, violets, jasmine, fresh hay, peaches, strawberry, honeysuckle, petrichor, icy mist, cinnamon, cloves, new leather, cut grass, lemon zest–I thought this one would be tough, but once you get me started, there are a lot of scents I love.

Favorite animals: Cats and horses.

Coffee, Tea, or Hot Cocoa: Tea, but I love them all.

Cat or Dog Person: Cat person (dogs are good too, but I just click better with cats).

Favorite Fictional Character: I have about a million that I all love equally, but for the sake of answering and keeping it short, I’m just going to say Eric van der Woodsen and Lilith Sternin.

Dream Trip: Venice, Italy. I just wanna ride in a freaking gondola, dang it.

Blog Created: Sometime in early 2012.

Number of Followers: 820 (WHAAAAAAT?)

What I Post About: Fandom stuff, memes, and feminist/social justice type stuff.

Do I get asks on a regular basis: No.

Aesthetic: I’m on mobile, so I can’t attach a picture, so here: http://icedteaandoldlace.tumblr.com/tagged/aesthetic

Hogwarts House: Gryffindor

LAST ___:

Drink: Tea


Phone Call: My sister.


Text message: My other sister, in the squad’s group message.


Song you listened to: The World Is Ugly by My Chemical Romance


Time you cried: I came pretty close last night, watching a video about a couple adopting disabled cats.

HAVE YOU EVER ____:

Dated someone twice: Never even dated someone once.

Been cheated on: Nope.

Kissed someone and then regretted it: Negative.


Lost someone special: Yes.


Been depressed: Who hasn’t?


Gotten drunk and thrown up: I’ve gotten tipsy, but never enough to throw up.

LIST THREE FAVORITE COLORS: Purple, pink, blue.


IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU _____:


Made new friends: Yeah. Not, like, anyone I hang out or go places with, but yeah.


Fallen out of love: No.

Laughed until you cried: Oh god yes.

Found out someone was talking about you: Yeah, but not in like a dramatic way.


Met someone who changed you: I don’t think so…


Found out who your true friends are: Nah, I’ve known that for a few years now.

Kissed someone on your Facebook list: No.

GENERAL:


How many Facebook friends do you know in real life: All but three. One I added accidentally but kept anyway, one’s a Dr. Doofenshmirtz roleplayer who I don’t even know why they added me, and the other’s the star of a direct-to-video movie I grew up watching, who somehow met my dad.

Do you have any pets: 10 cats.


Do you want to change your name: No, I like my name just fine.


What did you do for your last birthday: I had dinner with my family at a Japanese restaurant, and my mom made a coconut and Mandarin orange cake and took me shopping.


What time did you wake up: Today? 12-something or 1, idk.


What were you doing at midnight last night: I think I was having dinner. Or maybe taking a bath. Last night was a work night, and it went pretty late.

Name something you cannot wait for: All I’m really waiting for at the moment is my new debit card. My old one got skimmed, and being without one makes me nervous. But luckily my phone bill’s been paid and my car has enough gas to last till the new card comes in.


When was the last time you saw your mother: A couple hours ago.


What is something you wish you could change about your life: I would really like to be able to keep myself focused on literally anything, and to have more energy and less anxiety.


What are you listening to right now: The Kids Aren’t Alright by Fall Out Boy.


Have you ever talked to a person named tom: Yes.


Something that is getting on your nerves: My trash email app that NEVER gives me notifications and takes 9,000,000 years to refresh. Also, the fact that the stupid app store won’t let me download FREE apps until I’ve updated my billing information, which I can’t do until I get my new debit card.


Most visited website: Tumblr.


Elementary: Homeschooled.


High school: Homeschooled.


College: One semester of community college completed.


Hair color: Kind of a golden brown.


Long or short hair: Short. Usually in a stacked bob, but right now I have a pixie cut.


Do you have a crush on someone: I have a couple of cute coworkers, but I’m not like smitten or anything.


What do you like about yourself: I like a lot of things about myself. But my favorite thing about myself at the moment is the way I’m changing. I’ve been growing more confident and more responsible, and adulthood is suddenly a little less intimidating.

Piercings: Just your standard one in each earlobe situation. I’ve been considering getting them double pierced, though.


Blood type: I have no idea.



Relationship status: Single


Pronouns: Traditional feminine pronouns.

Favorite TV show: Criminal Minds, Boy Meets World, Gossip Girl, Frasier, Gilligan’s Island, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Madam Secretary, and lately I’ve been watching a lot of Home Improvement and Last Man Standing.


Tattoos: NOPE. They’re neat and all, but they’re not for me.


Right or left hand: Right.

FIRST ____:


Surgery: I had two teeth surgically removed, if that counts.


Piercing: The right ear, if I recall correctly. But that was 14 years ago, and both ears were pierced within moments of each other, so…


Best friend: My cousin, Lexy.

Sport: I’m pretty much limited to kickball.

Vacation: Eureka Springs and Silver Dollar City.


Pair of trainers: I’ve been through too many in my life to have any idea.

RIGHT NOW ___:


Eating: Nothing, but I had some chocolate chip cookies a little while ago.


Drinking: Water.


About to: Put on chapstick and work on one of my stories.


Listening to: The Call by Backstreet Boys


Waiting for: Still just the debit card.


Want: Some tapioca or rice pudding would be nice.

Get married: Someday, hopefully.




Career: Novelist.

WHICH IS BETTER ____:




Hugs or kisses: Hugs. I think. I’m not really sure.


Lips or eyes: Eyes.


Shorter or taller: I really don’t care.


Older or younger: I’m more likely to be interested in a guy who’s older than me than a guy who’s younger, but I would prefer someone as close to my own age as possible.




Nice arms or nice stomach: Arms.


Sensitive or loud: Sensitive, I think. But I do enjoy loud, chatty people, as long as they’re not rude or overbearing.


Hook up or relationship: Relationship.


Troublemaker or hesitant: If by hesitant you mean someone who thinks before they act, then that.

HAVE YOU EVER ____:

Kissed a stranger: No way.


Drank hard liquor: I’ve sipped a few different hard drinks. Hated every one of them.


Lost glasses/contact lenses: No.
 Forgotten to put on, yes, but lost, no.

Turned someone down: Only in the rejecting attempts at flirtation sense. I’ve never been asked out, so I’ve never really had anything to turn down.

Sex on first date: Never been on a date. And sex really isn’t my thing.

Broken someone’s heart: With all these people I’ve never dated and never been asked out by, I don’t see how I could.


Had your own heart broken: Once.


Been arrested: No.


Cried when someone died: Yes.


Fallen for a friend: More like fell for, then befriended, then fell even harder for.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN ____:


Yourself: In most aspects, yes. But not always.


Miracles: Yes.


Love at first sight: In most cases, no, but in the “is it possible/has it ever happened” sense, yes.


Santa Claus: No.




Kiss on the first date: I mean, it’s not something I would ever do, but I don’t have any kind of moral opposition to it.

Angels: Yeah, I think so.

OTHER ____:


Current best friend’s name: Sarah


Eye color: Blue


Movie: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

And idk who to tag, but if anyone wants to fill this out, you can say I tagged you and I'll read it. 😉